| Entry: | Another fun day in T5, as more and more features are being peeled out of their surrounding soil. Monique joined us for interwieving us on our way of excavating and documenting until breakfast.
AWH and JJW finished documenting the pit 16889 and then joined DEL and TEB in first taking down the bulk that was left in 2006 in the SW corner to isolate grave 2420 and then digging out the room fill as 16896. It is light grey and contains white chalky lumps of about the size of a fist, which may well be parts of wall plaster. Still, a lot of animal burrows disturb that fill. The protrusion that abuts wall 2424 we found last year is now definitely a butress with nice white plaster on all its three sides, and another one comes out right at the W profile. So we have most probably just missed the W wall of that space by some decimeters. The third butress abuts wall 5050 in the cut of grave 2420. A butress on each wall - it will look great in the photo once we have taken the fill down to that level. The architecture we got so far looks really Can-Hasan-like to me, but the protrusion of the butresses is less than their lengths along the wall.
So far ony the spaces that have thick plaster n their walls contain the grey-with-white-lumps fill. Space 340, whose E wall fortunaltely (re-?)appeared after the removal of disturbed soil unit 16884 was furher excavated by JMR and KJK who carefully scraped the walls to expose some poorly preserved plaster and possible phytoliths on the walls as 16880 , contains brownish soil. So does the large space between walls 2426, 2425, 5050, the continuation (?) of 2428 to the W and the W profile (unit 16880 further exacvated by So and MB today). It does not have any butresses so far, despite being pretty big - was it an an unroofed space?
Under 16884 appeared the continuation of a pit 16894 that was also overlied by 16861. The Selcuk team strated to document and excavate that. The concrete-hrad cloudy orange bricky area in the center of the E half of the trench is a real problem, as no one can detect its cut in the N and its relationship to another cloud at the E profile where 16887 yielded some stray human remains two days ago. Scarping down a bit more in hope of clarfying it, however, just hit skull fragments in what could be the W end of grave fill encased by the bricky orange, so Selcuk started to ducoment that grave today (16892 grave fill, 16893 grave cut).
RJW and AJH spent the afternoon with measuring a transect between the West and the East Mound in preparation for our grant proposal, and I am really looking forward to documenting all the new butresses tomorrow for the daily sketch! Had a lot of fun myself today cleaning wall 2426 which looks bad towards the corner with 2425 - is there a disturbance? |
