The first week of an excavation is usually the slowest one in terms of finds. Laying out excavations squares, clearing off the topsoil, and training the workmen how to dig carefully and methodically consumes a large amount of our time in these early days.
We have already found a few interesting artifacts in the northern sector of the Bronze Palace, although their contexts (that is, where they came from) were badly disturbed. To start, Dirk found two bronze fibulae. These are pins used to fasten cloaks or other garments that are of particular interest to us because we can date them stylistically. Like many objects that people use on a daily basis, certain shapes and decorative styles came in and out of fashion on a regular basis. Over the years, we have studied fibulae and can roughly tell in which century they were made based on the details of their design. Of course, when a bronze fibula comes out of the ground, the details are obscured by corrosion, dirt, and breakage. After conservation, the fibulae should provide us with some useful information. Dirk also found a bronze coin, shown here as it came out of the ground. After Lourdes is done with cleaning and conservation, we hope to be able to make an identification. I’ll upload a post-cleaning photograph in a few days. A carved ring, perhaps made out of ivory, decorated with a circular motif was discovered this morning from near the surface in the Bronze Palace.
Down in the lower town, in Operation V, where we hoped to find the barracks, John’s team immediately came across a pebble mosaic floor in the corner of the building on the second day of digging. This is both good and bad news. Good because it confirms the plan discovered via electrical resistivity shown in an earlier post. Bad because the floor is so close to the surface that it is unlikely that many of the contents of the room will have survived intact. We can always hope, but as you can see in the photo below, the mosaic floor shown as it was emerging from the earth is quite close to the modern surface. We should, however, be able to map a large area of the building and perhaps improve significantly on the geophysical plan from 2004.
