Bucranium set in the wall 2106. It is placed in a subcircular niche and the wall plaster locks it in, right behind the eye sockets. The nose of the cranium is cut.
For the skull and horn description see unit sheet 11963.
Preserved and conserved in situ for display.
From Archive Report 2005 :
F.2175 is the bull head with horns set into a niche in the western wall to the north of bench F.2021 (Fig. 40). This emplacement was set approximately 0.2m above the platform (F.2174) surface. The state of preservation of the feature was relatively good, despite the obvious exposure to the fire. It was not uniformly heat affected it and so the tips of both horns were calcined and white, while the bases of both the right and left horn-cores appear to have been subjected to a mixture of high and low temperatures, being grey and white, calcined as well as carbonated.
The frontal of the cranium was fire blackened. The skull and horns were set in a low bench in a semicircular niche cut into wall F.2106, it was therefore clearly not freestanding and only horns and snout protruded. It appears that the nasal area was transformed by sectioning the snout, prior to the installation of the feature into the wall. The tip of the snout was very close to the floor, almost making contact with it. The fact that the skull was fixed into the wall with plaster layers up against it and behind the eye sockets, provided great stability to the entire feature, and therefore it survived in situ despite the collapse of walls an roof. It must be noted that the skull and horns were not plastered in this case unlike many bucrania excavated in the 1960s. A few centimeters north of the niche that accommodated the bull’s head were
found a pair of goat horns, placed on the floor and against the wall.
Within the burnt debris above the installation F.2175, a large number of horns was found together with another very fragmentary bull skull but none of these appeared to have been in their original location, being placed on top of the room fill (10286) (Fig. 41). The question of how and why this pile of horns existed above the intact installation will be discussed in depth further on but it is possible that they existed as installations elsewhere in the room prior to the fire, which were gathered post fire, perhaps when Building 51 was under construction, and placed / protected/ preserved in this location as a significant deposition?
Removed 03.07.13 by conservation team. At the same time, the fill (U. 20649) was removed. On a depth of c. 0,1 m two x-finds were found: a piece of antler (X1) and a flint blade (X2).
See 13/035 and unit sheet 20649 for sketch. |
