For the sake of transparency, I will admit that as we have gotten to the deeper, less disturbed layers, I have been reminded various times to be more careful and cautious. Given the intensity of the manual labor that has been required simply to open our unit, I fear I got used to the “powering through” mentality that came with swinging around a pickaxe and honing in on removing roots and rocks. Safe to say if you see a hole in our unit, there’s a 90% chance it was created by me as I got a wee bit carried away. Don’t get me wrong, my eyes were always peeled for bones, pottery, and glass. But when we found a coin in our unit, and I saw its inconspicuous and unassuming size and coloring, I realized the importance of slowing down as you sweep.
Many of our most fascinating finds have been similarly unassuming on the surface. The high quantity of glass and metal slag we have found has hinted us towards the burn layer that we discovered at the end of last week. While these pieces of slag are dark black and shiny in the middle, if not broken, its exterior literally looks like a clump of dirt. An excess of mortar around what we later discovered to be a wall, at first glance is easily confused with limestone. Curiosity and caution have become the motto as we dig deeper into our units.
Although this has been a difficult lesson in slowing down, it has been beyond rewarding. Across the center of our unit we discovered a curved line of huge rocks, lining up with a wall on the adjacent unit. Keeping this in the back of our minds, we continued excavating and discovered an aggressive soil change, isolated to the southern side of this possible feature. This soil was significantly darker in comparison to the red soil north of the rocks, and it contained the burnt smell and greasy texture of an ash layer. The isolated soil change allowed us to confirm the feature as a wall, and its ashy characteristics left us with questions about a possible burn. Thinking for a few hours that we had discovered a kiln given a ring of reddish/orangey soil around the sphere of ash, we accentuated my still quite new skill of caution. This theory has lost the backing of a few people on site given the thinness of the ash layer. However, I am intrigued to hear the findings of the soil sample and will continue to act with the same degree of caution required when we initially suspected a kiln. I find it curious that we have only discovered glass and metal and glass slag on this southern side of the unit, and consider this to be an interesting aggregate of findings isolated by one architectural feature. I don’t want to say that I’m going kiln crazy, but just know that I’m holding out a little bit of hope and I fear I don’t know enough about the soil to disapprove the theory altogether.
While soil and stratigraphy has been the basis of all our discoveries these past few weeks, it has also been the source of many of my frustrations. I am scared by the triangle of doom and the guess work (at least to some extent, from my perspective) from which we get answers like 65% silt and 35% sand. The Munsell readings a lot of the time feel like I’m in the paint aisle of a hardware store trying to distinguish between off white and eggshell white. But the main reason for this frustration is the knowledge that soil findings are anything but insignificant. While I don’t know if I would want to focus on this specific field of archaeology, I certainly carry a lot of respect and admiration for the information that soil provides.
Now to answer the more entertaining question of my favorite of the wild theories concocted about our unit, I would say the one I am manifesting most is that unit ANS8 is part of a giant labyrinth. Instead of our site being a neighborhood, giant house, or apartment complex, the janky walls, skinny corridors, and strange corners we have discovered these past few weeks are in reality MEANT to confuse us. That was their architectural purpose all along! Wouldn’t that be splendid if we figured out that we were just as confused about the architecture of this site as the ancient peoples who called this home, or if it was a labyrinth I guess they would’ve called it their hell. How thrilling.