Yesterday the team reassembled refreshed and overfed after the Ramzan (Ramadan) holiday, known as the Şeker Bayramı (the sugar festival; the same event is known in Arabic as Eid al-Fitr). We immediately got to work uncovering a series of burials in Trenches H and P, with that in H, preserving the impressions of a basket or mat beneath the body.
Baskets and other organic materials usually rot in archaeological sites and are preserved at dry sites like Boncuklu only when burnt, if they contain lots of silica (phytoliths) or are preserved as impressions. Çatalhöyük has some wonderful examples of coiled baskets preserved as silica skeletons (see www.catalhoyuk.com), including numerous examples used to bury children. So far, Boncuklu has yielded direct evidence of simply woven mats and, last week, an obsidian cache container possibly made of string or other woven threads. Furthermore, usewear evidence suggests that some artefacts were used in plant working, including possibly weaving and basketry.
The new find from BK can be seen in the centre of the photo above and adds substantially to our direct evidence for woven artefacts. The large patch of weave impressions extended beneath a burial and the details of the design could be seen. Microscopic analysis showed that the artefact was woven from reedy/grassy like plants using a simple basket weave technique which is widely practised around the world today. We hope that some phytoliths will be preserved in the impressions from the original fibres allowing Emma Jenkins to say which kind of plant was used to make the basket.
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