Beginning to excavate more contextual, less disturbed layers, I have begun to expect anything. Excavating the more disturbed layers, I expected to only find some pottery and lots of huge rocks; now I am excited to dig even deeper and see what we will discover! I am very curious about what our unit was once used for, especially considering our strange layout and singular wall. I am beginning to expect (or hope) to find more coins, glass, and possibly other metal pieces because we are excavating against a wall where interesting pieces likely would have washed up. The current layer we are excavating is extremely rocky and we haven’t found anything very interesting in our last few passes. However, hopefully we will find something awesome before the next group takes over! We have found some bigger sherds than we have previously, so hopefully even bigger things are coming. I have found that excavating less disturbed layers is much more fun than excavating the top layers because my hopes of finding something interesting increase with every layer.<\/p>\n
I have come to agree with the theory that our overall site was once a neighborhood, but I am still pretty stumped about what our specific area could have been. I feel confident that the northwest length of rocks is a wall, but I am unsure about whether our area was an indoor area or somewhere outside. I am leaning more towards the theory that our area was part of a courtyard or outside area and that our northwest wall was a wall separating the private neighborhood from outside of the neighborhood area.<\/p>\n
Next week I will largely be thinking about what the purpose of the northwest wall was and whether that indicates a building or simply a neighborhood area. I am also curious about our sudden uncovering of a huge amount of rockfall and what that may indicate. Excavation has become a lot more difficult due to these rocks and their massive sizes, and our rock parties have become more frequent (unfortunately). I really enjoy using the big and small pickaxes to loosen dirt and make our 10cm passes easier, and this hasn’t been as possible due to all of the rocks in our area. I am going to be more attentive to the depth of our passes as well; creating holes is much easier to do when removing rocks and we want to have consistent depths of our passes.<\/p>\n
The one aspect of archaeology that I would like to study more is probably bones. The fact that we find human remains is fascinating to me, and I have always had an interest in bones. Sorting and interpreting what the different bones we find could mean would be amazing, and I really want to get better at identifying bones (animal species\/specific bones). I am also especially interested in anything adjacent to art history, so being able to study mosaic pieces, understand conservation\/curation in this context, or anything else art would really interest me. Excavating is a lot of fun, but I think my true interests lie in bioarchaeology and the more artistic aspects of our findings. Any opportunity to study either of these would be appreciated!<\/p>\n
Our group theorized a potential goat murder, possibly including swine and equines as well. We believe that foul play was involved, especially when taking burn evidence into account. Cremation to destroy murder evidence or the goat bodies? Perhaps… How else could those bones have gotten there?? We are committed to solving this potential murder, or even mass goat suicide. This could be another potential reason for studying bioarchaeology. PETA would not be happy with the gruesome scene we have uncovered. #Justiceforancientgoats #MrBeastsponsorus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beginning to excavate more contextual, less disturbed layers, I have begun to expect anything. Excavating the more disturbed layers, I expected to only find some pottery and lots of huge rocks; now I am excited to dig even deeper and see what we will discover! I am very curious about what our unit was once […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5734,"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_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_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},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3840","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-ZW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3840","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\/5734"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3840"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3858,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3840\/revisions\/3858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.stolaf.edu\/antiochia2014\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}