Ancient Archaeology

As I thought a bit about the archaeological remains left behind by modern archaeologists, we cleaned a scarp produced by looters to reveal clear evidence for another archaeological event in the same area.

The photo below shows the remains of a pit dug at some point that provided an excavator (of some description with access to the tomb). If you look carefully at the area between the dotted lines in the photograph below, you can see a series of stones and pot sherds oriented in a consistent direction. This indicates that the hole was probably filled in a single or closely related series of taphonomic processes. (In other words, the dirt in this earlier excavated area was probably filled in through something like erosion).

You can probably also see that the fill in the area is a different color than that to its right.

(It was a bit challenging to get a good photo of this because immediately behind me to the west was a 8 m drop into a pricker bush.)

We’re hoping that the careful excavation of this deposit will tell us something about past field work at our site. We know that Luigi Palma Di Cesnola excavated some tombs near or on our site in the 19th century. Perhaps this is the remains of his work.