24th
Excavation and off to the university!
Saturday 24th September 2011
Today, as with last Saturday, was quite a long day - but successful! This morning was spent up at the site where most of the activity - and manpower focussed on T9! T11 continued to go down and now the extended section of the trench is at approximately the same depth as the original western part. Plant remains below the surface may suggest that we will soon be coming down upon a feature - but we wait another day to see!
In T9 the trench was extended in order to allow us to see the full outline of a number of burials which were - as is always the case - running into the baulk of the trench. This work was carried out mostly successful in a short space of time this morning and the drawings commenced. In the rest of the trench, one burial was lifted and another prepared for drawing, which will take placed tomorrow.
Our conservator, Yasser, continued to work with yet another fragile coffin, but with the consolidants he is managing a very good job of reconstruction and tomorrow the students will spend part of the day either in conservation or pottery training! So there will be many students drawing pottery sherds and also in reconstructing coffins! The students will spend the period before second breakfast in the trench, however - since we missed their input in the trench today!
At 2pm we all met in the university and Tass spoke to the students about the Harris Matrix and the recording of archaeological stratigraphy and Larry discussed some of the burials that had been excavated during the previous week. The students were very discussive today and everyone enjoyed the weekly quiz too!
We were joined tonight by our ceramicist Ashraf el-Senussi who will work together with Mandy, our visiting ceramicist and fellow fieldschool teacher. We are very happy to welcome them both!
