2001 TRENCH PC 18 Kate Topper, Field Supervisor Week 2: View into PC 18 (left) and Lindsey Fine (right). We have finished excavating the second level of stratum 5 in the first and second loci of the trench. The south end of Locus 1 has continued to produce a good deal of coarseware, bucchero, and impasto (some of it incised), including a large fragment of an impasto chalice we uncovered on Friday. We have found several stones placed in a diagonal line across the southwest corner of this locus, just west of the spot where we found the roof tiles last week; it is possible that these stones form part of the foundation wall of a building, but we will not know for sure until the entire extended trench has been excavated down to this level. Therefore, although stratum 5 still remains in some areas of Loci 1 and 2, we will postpone excavation of the rest of stratum 5 until we have excavated the first four strata of the extension. View down into PC 18 to the possible wall stones. We laid out and began excavating the extended trench on Monday. The extended five-meter by five-meter trench encompasses the two loci we have already excavated, and I have designated the entire unexcavated area Locus 3. The southwest corner of our extended trench touches upon a shallow rectangular depression in the earth immediately south of the trench, and the presence of several chiselled stones in the area around this depression suggests that the depression may be a pit that was dug and then partially refilled by modern quarrymen. We had begun to wonder earlier in the week whether stratum 3, a dark layer that extends only partly across the trench, could be the topsoil that was removed when the quarry pit was dug, and the two pieces of modern glass we found in this stratum today suggest that our guess was correct. I can only hope at this point that the pit was not dug deeply enough to affect the lower strata of our trench. Kate Topper (left) and Ashley Bennet laying out an extension of Trench PC 18. Because the material in the first four strata has been washed down from the top of the hill and therefore lacks a useful archaeological context (and because we know from last year that these strata contain few artifacts), we are moving through the upper strata quickly. We have nearly finished removing stratum 3, and I hope to be ready to begin excavating stratum 5 in Locus 3 by the end of next week. Rachel Julis and Keith Doherty working in the trench (above) while Reagan Browning and Mary McClellan sift (below).   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