I turned 20 this week, and I wouldn\u2019t have expected to be so excited about spending my birthday troweling through dirt, but as we get lower and lower into the unit, every find becomes a little more exciting. Each new discovery is one step closer to puzzling together what this room really was.<\/p>\n
As we’ve moved further down into the unit, I\u2019ve been considering the placement of things we find more and more. When we first began excavating, we were working through wall fall, and most of what we found had likely fallen in from the sites\/hill above ACNS. The locations of the pottery, tiles, bones, etc. we found were much more random. As we removed large rocks and got closer to packed soil and plaster, our finds were more densely populated along walls. For example, the coins and roof nail that Grace found in the north corner. Now that we\u2019ve broken through the plaster flooring, everything we uncover is \u201csealed,\u201d and I\u2019m curious about what the future findings will be and where they\u2019ll be located. This can give us clues as to how the room we\u2019re excavating was used or abandoned in the past.<\/p>\n
Additionally, moving into older layers has made me much more curious about how changes in my unit compare\/line up with the adjoining units. Community and collaboration are important factors in helping to contextualize what we find in the unit. It also just makes the work day more fun. I\u2019m grateful for the entire team and the little community we\u2019ve created together. This was clear to me on my birthday when, thanks to Audrey, everyone signed my card and we all shared baklava and cake!<\/p>\n
So far, I\u2019d theorize that my unit\u2019s layers, beginning with the earliest, are bedrock, fill, plaster, and wall fall. I believe that at some point my unit and the adjoining unit (7D) were an audience hall that was later segmented into two rooms. I\u2019m curious if the room was something else before it became an audience hall, and how the discoveries in adjoining units fit into the changes in our unit.<\/p>\n
If I were to hone in on one aspect of archaeology, I think it would be ceramics. I get so excited when I find a ceramic fragment that has clues on it like finger marks, ash, curvature, etc. Ceramics is a place where my love for art history lines up nicely with the archaeological work we’re doing.<\/p>\n
If the unit isn\u2019t an audience hall, I think it must be a bank because we\u2019ve found four coins so far. The reason we have no other evidence for the bank theory is because all of the tills, safes, and counters were made of wood. And the bank lines up nicely with the proposed elephant church theory, after all, what are elephants without their money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I turned 20 this week, and I wouldn\u2019t have expected to be so excited about spending my birthday troweling through dirt, but as we get lower and lower into the unit, every find becomes a little more exciting. Each new discovery is one step closer to puzzling together what this room really was. As we’ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5437,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Iz8A-UM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5437"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3520"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3522,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520\/revisions\/3522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}