Week II

This week at Gabii revolved around excavating the interesting walled room with the steps I discussed in my previous post. We continually rotated between pickaxing, shovel tossing, and sieving our wheelbarrow for finds before trading our tools in for subtler excavation instruments.

As the volunteers in our room excavated closer to the presumed level of the floor, the soil became incredibly compact with rocks and huge chunks of tile. We tried to trowel one of the longer walls in hope of an emerging floor surface. Luckily we struck a firm, flat surface and dubbed it as the floor that we could follow with our trowels. Arduously, our team worked on peeling back the floor surface for the rest of the week, but not without a few surprises.

After alternating between the trowel and the mini pickaxe for the thousandth time midweek, I started to see a curved feature in the floor. In my previous area, seeing circular cuts or obscure linear deposits would be normal fare, but not in such clear constructions in the Imperial Era. As we peeled back the compact soil covering our floor, we discovered a circular depression right in the middle of the concrete! Neither supervisor nor volunteer knew what to make of it, but our area knew we had stumbled upon something even more significant than the steps.

Erica Canavan utilizing the miniature pickaxe and trowel to define the stair feature.

Continuing to scrape soil from the right side of the room, the perspective of our team drastically changed. Our level surface was exchanged for a rough layer with huge inclusions jutting out in the floor. What's more, the separation between both surfaces revealed a narrow cut bordered by local stones.

By the end of the week my team was ready to finish excavating. We had been working diligently for two weeks and finally wanted to see the fruits of our labor with a quick brush of the walls and floors. Of course, nothing in this room was accomplished easily and Friday was no exception. Planted firmly on the last foot of unexcavated floor surface were two sturdy basalt rocks. Basalt at Gabii is distinctly dark grey/black and notably used as road pavers.

While most of the rocks on site are more friable than tiles found in the same SU, basalt will remain undented in spite of our efforts. Time and pressure has been shown to gradually weather the rocks in a few hundred years, which makes them great for road building. Lifting the stones is the only way to get them to budge, but similar to lead objects, the basalt volume and density do not correlate with the estimated weight of the rocks.

A visual representation of the two basalt stones our SU team removed (still in situ).

With all of this information in mind, my team had been staring down these two massive rocks for a solid seven days, eager to liberate them from our SU. Four individuals guided the basalt stones into a wheelbarrow and dumped them into their spoil heap resting place.

Although we were all happy to ultimately see the full floor and give it a final brush, the basalt stones removal was a major turning point for my team's morale. Seeing those rocks get tossed aside onto our soil waste pile reaffirmed that our physical and mental strengths in a particularly complex and rigorous SU. Our teamwork and efforts of the past two weeks were validated so poignantly, signifying turning point for our time at Gabii and archaeological career paths. Naturally, we celebrated with gelato that night.