2004 TRENCHES PC 24 & 26 Josh Moran, Field Supervisor Aaron Bartels, Assistant Field Supervisor Week 6: Field Students: Marie Hall Kamissa Mort Kelley Satarino Left to right: Aaron Bartels, Kelley Satarino, Marie Hall, Josh Moran, and Kamissa Mort. As we near the end of excavation, we are concentrating our efforts on the western half of PC 26. This will allow us to get to a reasonable depth along the western wall foundation. We will also be able to remove a lot of the large coarseware fragments in Locus 4 which I have now decided to call Feature 5. View of Trench PC 26 from the northeast. In the northwest portion of the trench, we have removed the majority of the sandstone, tile and mudbrick rubble. While it seemed like there would be a chance of finding crushed vessels or something else to that effect beneath it, we did in fact find almost nothing. The soil in the northern portion of that area was stained a very deep red and black color because of all the mudbrick that was contained in and above it. The soil in the center of this quarter of the trench is very yellow and contains almost no artifacts. In the southern part of this quadrant, the soil is very dark grey with large bits of ceramic and tile in it as well as a fair number of artifacts. We have a very strange mix of soils in this portion of the trench and it seems unclear why. Kelley Satarino and Marie Hall digging in Trench PC 26. We've found that the western wall foundation extends very deeply into our trench. We are now in our sixth pass in Stratum 3 and the wall foundation still appears to go deeper. So far it seems to have at least 5 layers of stone and extends approximately one meter deep in our trench. This is very much in contrast to the eastern wall foundation in our trench which only has two layers of stone and only goes about 50 cm deep. View from the east showing the west wall in Trench PC 26.   View from the west of the east wall in PC 26.     Lately, we have been finding a lot of large pieces of ceramic storage vessels. We have one white coarseware base which has a spiral pattern in the base. This is made from the same type of ceramic which our coarseware handle from last week was made (which by the way we found the other matching half to, so we now have the whole handle). We also found a large portion of the rim and handle to a large fineware vessel. It has a very nice profile which might be useful in assessing a date for its manufacture. Also interesting was the discovery of a very large base to a pythos vessel. It has a stepped platform which it would have rested on. The fabric is very thick and the curvature of the base is very shallow, which means this would have been an extremely large vessel. Fineware and coarseware finds from PC 26 with drawing in field notebook on Josh Moran's desk. We are looking forward to excavating the rest of Locus 4 now. The large coarseware fragments look like they will join together so that we can reconstruct significant portions of a few large vessels. This will be our priority for the remainder of the excavation season because of the complexity involved. This area also contains a number of very large pieces of burnt wood which we would like to be able to get out in once piece. Carbonized wood is very fragile so we will have to take out a large portion of the dirt around it and let conservators remove it in the lab with very sensitive tools. Hopefully, these next few days will go well. Aaron Bartels examines a find from PC 26 while Kamissa Mort looks on.   Kelley Satarino, Aaron Bartels, Kamissa Mort, and Marie Hall encircle their leader, Josh Moran.   Aaron Bartels and Josh Moran triangulating points.   Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 Week 7 - Final Report Director, Gregory Warden gwarden@mail.smu.edu Director, Michael Thomas michael.thomas@tufts.edu While the team is in Italy during the summer field season, send e-mail to: mvap3@dada.it To email an individual on the team, enter the person's last name in the subject heading. Excavation house phone: 055-844-9834, or, when calling from the US: 011-39-55-844-9834. Introduction | 2004 Field Season | Poggio Colla Field School | What’s New | Staff | Students Site History | Directors' Diaries | Student Diaries | Excavation Friends | Facilities | Conservation | Surveys Robert Belanger | Katherine Blanchard | Josh Moran | Caitlin Vacanti | Ivo van der Graaff | Robert Vander Poppen QuickTime VR | Site Set-Up | Dig Daily Life | Excavation Process | Field Manual | Lectures | Season's End Archives | Finds | Research Projects | Publications | Bibliography | Mugello Area | Home