The Age of the Early Aurignacian - New Excavations at Willendorf II
The WillenBlog of last year seemed to be quite a success, the only complaint was that we did not update it frequently enough, especially towards the end. This had some technical reasons, as well as the frantic activity in general towards the end of the excavation. This time though, we promise that you will have the news from the excavation every day. Stay tuned, the WillenBlog 2007 starts on August 6th!
We had about 70 liters of rain per square meter in the night, wreckign the tarps covering the excavation. We spent several hours in the pouring rain trying to save the excavation.
Some areas need an unconventional approach. Here we excavate the classical Aurignacian layer 4.
We finished excavating Level 23 in some squares, we documented the sections afterwards.
We finally have a roof to shelter us against sun and rain. Mr. Perzl, one of the workers of the municipality helped building it (actually, we helped him...).
Our colleagues from Krems Wachtberg visited us this morning, we will repay the visit on friday.
The easiest solution would have been to simply cover up the site and go home, but we had exposed another decapage of our until know unidentified horizon. Here we use the laser point to aim the total station, and then use reflectorless measurements for the positions of the artefacts.
We got quite a bit of rain in the afternoon. We do not have a roof above the excavation yet, so we had to hold up tarps - not a very good solution!
Karel Valoch, Zdenka Nerudova and Petr Neruda from the Moravian Museum visited us today. The weather was still nice then.
We could use every hand for removing the sediment from the 1955 trench, so we were very happy Fabian Siegle from the Anthropology Department of Vienna University is such an able shoveler!
Thursday we finally reached a rich artefact bearing horizon in zone 4. The problem is, that it is neither Layer 4 nor Layer 3, but something in between! We'll probably need a few more days to figure out what is going on there. The stratigraphy is complicated by the fact that this is still strongly bioturbated area, as can be seen in the upper part of the old section.
Mr. Kappelmüller, the head of the Willendorf Museum Society, is one of our staunchest local supporters. He allowed us to use their old house as our lab, and helps us with all local arrangements. Here he watches Philip removing artefacts.
Johanna aims the total station at the reflector. The position information and other data are stored in a Pocket PC® running the program EDM CE (by Shannon McPherron and Harold Dibble).
We continued excavating Layer 5 in Zone 3 on thursday. Here, Barbara holds the reflector for the total station to measure the 3D coordinates of a charcoal piece.
Today, we managed to remove big parts of the backfill of the old excavations, part of the 1909 western section can be seen in the center of the image. The upper parts of the section were destroyed by illegal digging in the 20th century.
This is how the area looked yesterday early afternoon
We finished removing the backfill from Zone 3 in the morning, so we could start with the excavation there. Removing the about 10 cubic meters of backfill from Zone 1 was more work!
Passing around the sacred umbilical chord
Today was the 99th anniversary of the discovery of the Willendorf Venus. This led many visitors to the site today, among them a small group who held their "meditation" with prayers, anointments and other rituals at the Venus statue during our lunch break...
We spent days to fill it back, now we spend days to remove it again...
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