Sections of the outside ditch at Bela Vista 5:a previous layer was excavated in the centre and after refilled with other deposits.
This is, in a certain way, another version of
overlapped ditches problem. In fact, it is frequent to record evidences of
ditches that were reopened, by the re-excavation of part of its previous
fillings. It is important to notice that only when the reopening is partial is
it
detectable by archaeology. The total remove of previous filling deposits
leaves no evidence, and if they occurred, then these activities would have been
even more common.
This creates problems to ditch dating, because there
might be a significant time between the initial excavation of a ditch and its
last filling sequence. Only with several sections and good dating sequences we
can evaluate these problems.
But another problem is why they reopened some ditches?
And why frequently just a central part of the ditch, leaving a ditch with “walls
of sediment”? Is it because they want to rapidly fill it again with new
deposits and materials? They must have done so, otherwise those “walls of
sediment” would have been eroded (and we can clearly see them in some sections,
like the one presented here).
This kind of stratigraphic sequences points to human
intentionality in the formation of the deposits inside ditches, not just because
of the materials or the structured organization they might present. The
structure of the deposits itself may be an argument to that intentionality.
I have been searching for hours and I haven’t found such awesome work.
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It was presented in a conference last week, but still not published.But you have more information in other post of the blog, like the sections drawings.
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