When a Rock isn't Just a Rock

Back in the moat, we've been having a lot of trouble with some big rocks. This is made worse by the fact that the Spanish archaeologists want us to work faster. Some background on this site, the American archaeologists are guests here, so we do things the way the Spanish want them done. Regardless of how we believe they should be done. For this site in particular they are hoping to incorporate it into a museum, not so much for research as for display to the public. So there is pressure to find things and get as much of the area excavated as possible. When moving fast, there will of course be sacrifices when it comes to context, and there is no better example for this than what happened in the moat on Friday.

We're working quickly at the moat to try and get deeper, they apparently have a goal in mind, and based on what they found in a nearby trench they are hoping to find a structure. So we are moving as fast as we can, layer by layer, going back and forth across the trench. It was odd that in one spot we were coming across some very large rocks. These were of course preventing us from going deeper, and as that was the goal, these rocks were removed. Now I don't want to give too much away, but we're in the Iron Age right now, and structures are made of rock. But we're also in the moat section of the dig, and the moat is just what you think it is, minus the crocodiles. So finding a structure here would be odd. So no one thinks anything of these rocks, and out they go (normally if the rocks are this big and in a particular place you would leave them and dig around them until you were positive they weren't part of anything).

As we go deeper though, you can see the pattern of the rocks along the sides of the trench and they begin to suggest a wall. The Spanish are thrilled and start focusing on the rocks. My teammate and I have a bad feeling. Because all of those rocks we removed from the bottom of the trench are right in line with these rocks. We point this out to the Spanish trench head, and it hits him too.

Archaeology by nature is destructive. In excavating a site you are destroying it. An example would be a hearth we are excavating in a nearby trench. There are rocks on the inside too, we draw them to remember that they are there, and then we remove them, so that part of the hearth is for lack of a better word destroyed so that we can find things underneath. Context is preserved by the archaeological drawing. We have to go deeper to find what's there and to get a better understanding.

Now these rocks in the moat might not be anything, but it looks like it might be something. The breakneck speed of which they are having us excavate at may have caused something important to be over looked and damaged. You can't put those rocks back, their context has been lost. There is nothing to be done but more forward and hope that it doesn't happen again.