Records fixed.

Now back home, the gaps in our records are painfully obvious but not easy to fix. What is to be done? Photogrammetry is not finished in many areas, sections lacked annotations for specific types of reused materials, and bulk finds photography, permitted generously by Peter in the depot, is visibly not complete. I prepare to face the inevitable: despite being exhausted and now home, I need to return to Sagalassos to complete the year’s work. What we had was not a serious archive, although it came close to it in some areas, where a good part of the work had been brilliantly done. What is needed now is consistency and quality control. But how can this be done so close to the start of term, and by someone already worn out by a summer of travel and fieldwork? How could this be managed with so many tasks still to accomplish, from a distant desk in Canterbury, where my responsibilities now lie.

The answer has come from Türkiye: Zehra has volunteered to return to site, to assure the gaps in records were filled, plans were checked, and finds were properly photographed. Thus, she has returned alone to site to work in the last days of the season to heroically complete the work that was left unfinished, and on which the report-writing now depends. This involves not just drawing, photographing, and measuring, but hands-on cleaning for photogrammetry, the shattering of holiday nails for the clearing of scrub, on hands and knees, to permit proper photography. All completed to a high degree of thoroughness and excellence. In doing this, she takes a position familiar from previous seasons of our work, of the one lone individual who returns to help out when others have gone, previously held by Martha, Francis, and others, aware that fieldwork must continue to exist as record, long after the fun has stopped.

16.1 Zehra’s photomosaics: the west wall of the church in LAS, over Agora Gate podium, devegetated without the correct equipment, breaking her nails.

16.2 Zehra’s drawings, checking and annotating sections