Today was awesome compared to what we've found so far! We started out with some pictures and planning out the few rocks in trench 33 and the Red Death corner. I got to try my hand at planning on a grid square. It's meticulous work, if not a little difficult. You take a plumb bob and basically try to get as completely over what you were drawing as possible. Then you have a grid square and you transfer each feature, square for square. I got lucky, I only had to draw four rocks and a little outline in the northwest corner of the Red Death section. Somehow I managed to draw four circles, roughly the proper size and shape of the rocks in the middle of the grid.
That's when things started getting interesting. The Red Death section was given the context number 321, while the rest of the soil was context 320. When we started digging, we found part of a plaster floor and that got context 329. Along with the plaster floor, we found two stone pavers, including one that I helped the workman remove that was pratically intact. It looked a bit like a puzzle, but we pulled out all the pieces and put them in their own bag so that at the museum they could be easily pieced back together. The wall so far is looking like a series of rocks, but we haven't taken them out yet because we found more rocks underneath. They don't exactly line up nicely, but we're holding out for a connection.
In Trench 34, to the east of 33, we found a lamb bone, possibly part of a leg I think...? It was really cool because there were two pieces that could fit together and we had the end, where the joint would've been. They also found a bronze piece in that trench and I pulled out an ancient, rusty nail from the sift. Again, supper cool. Unfortunately now that we are in a real context and not on the surface layer, we have to send buckets to the sift, which means the majority of our trench spent most of our time down there. I got to come up and help supervise and run paperwork at the end, which is a bit more interesting since you are there when they make these really cool finds.
Right now they are leaning towards the Geometric period with the pottery we've been finding. I found this beautiful base piece with painted lines and an orange and black, rimmed base that they dated, likely to the Geometric Period. This is really cool because, until our excavation of the Lower Town, most archaeologists believed that Mycenae was completely abandoned after the Mycenaeans and remained uninhabited. But since we're finding walls and pottery and other really cool stuff in the Geometric Period (around 900-700 BC), that is obviously not the case! Take THAT Schliemann!
Tomorrow I have no idea what we will find, but I'm super excited. If it's anything like today, it promises to be awesome.
That's when things started getting interesting. The Red Death section was given the context number 321, while the rest of the soil was context 320. When we started digging, we found part of a plaster floor and that got context 329. Along with the plaster floor, we found two stone pavers, including one that I helped the workman remove that was pratically intact. It looked a bit like a puzzle, but we pulled out all the pieces and put them in their own bag so that at the museum they could be easily pieced back together. The wall so far is looking like a series of rocks, but we haven't taken them out yet because we found more rocks underneath. They don't exactly line up nicely, but we're holding out for a connection.
In Trench 34, to the east of 33, we found a lamb bone, possibly part of a leg I think...? It was really cool because there were two pieces that could fit together and we had the end, where the joint would've been. They also found a bronze piece in that trench and I pulled out an ancient, rusty nail from the sift. Again, supper cool. Unfortunately now that we are in a real context and not on the surface layer, we have to send buckets to the sift, which means the majority of our trench spent most of our time down there. I got to come up and help supervise and run paperwork at the end, which is a bit more interesting since you are there when they make these really cool finds.
Right now they are leaning towards the Geometric period with the pottery we've been finding. I found this beautiful base piece with painted lines and an orange and black, rimmed base that they dated, likely to the Geometric Period. This is really cool because, until our excavation of the Lower Town, most archaeologists believed that Mycenae was completely abandoned after the Mycenaeans and remained uninhabited. But since we're finding walls and pottery and other really cool stuff in the Geometric Period (around 900-700 BC), that is obviously not the case! Take THAT Schliemann!
Tomorrow I have no idea what we will find, but I'm super excited. If it's anything like today, it promises to be awesome.