Dissertation Weekly #9

This week I am returning to my Late Bronze Chapter.  This past week I have been busy scanning pottery and spent a couple of days at Jalul (blog post soon), so there has been no writing.  I think I can manage a few more sentences over the coming weeks from the chapters I have already written, but the well might run dry at some point as I focus on scanning 115 crates of pottery.

Both of these elevations are between 50 and 60 cms higher than the level of floor B4.19 (924.73) or the plaster (B4.21) located on top of it found in the northeast corner (924.85).[1]

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[1] Although there is a question as to the accuracy of these elevations because in 1983 it is recorded that locus 25, a small ashy layer in the northeast corner of the square, abuts the foundation of walls 7 and 8 and its elevation is 923.95 (however in the weekly summary locus 21, this plaster surface (locus 25) on top of locus 19 is described as being “below the level of the walls” Ditchfield 1983).  The relation of the floor level 19 is never indicated (the north balk and east balk section drawings seem to show locus 19 as being below the foundation level of walls 7 and 8) and it is likely that if this elevation is correct these walls were later and cut into this LB floor layer.

Apologies for the information drop, but I wanted to highlight one of the largest problems with going through old excavations: accuracy.  Here I am discussing a Late Bronze floor level in B4.  This level is more or less in the middle of the square and is surrounded by walls.  My assumption was that the walls dated to the Iron Age II and were not associated with the Late Bronze floor, but I had to check.  The sentence is stating that in 2001 the bottom of these walls were measured at a higher level than the floor, making the walls later.  However, the footnote is explaining how when these loci were originally excavated in 1983 there was a discrepancy within the same notebook regarding the relationship of part of the LB level to the walls.  Just reading that footnote makes my head hurt, and I wrote it.