| Entry: | Craig 3rd of September
End of the week and only one more proper digging week to go. In space 155 Adnan has cleaned up and taken all his photographs, it looks really good. Between 156 and 157 Asa has started to remove blocking F.249. It has the same packing on its northern side (3810) that is on the rest of the wall. It loks like there is only one additional deposit more on the floor in 157 than there is in 156, this tends to confirm all the other indications that the blocking is quite late in the history of building 5.
In 154 Sharon drew a section of the deposits on platform 239 revealed by the edge of [3867], there seem to be over 50 layers which together constitute around 16cm of depth. Some of these are quite dirty. I have removed some of floors (3845) and (3844) where they nearly meet. (3844) is actually a large number of thin plaster floors, c.20?, with one or more phases of being painted red. The red paint is much clearer on the SW and NW edges perhaps indicating that there was less wear there. By removing 3844 and the underlying layer 3870 and 3872 it becomes clearer that there is an earlier platform in the NW corner. Over time this platform became less and less pronounced until it was simply a slightly raised area. This must have been deliberate, in Building 5 the SW platform extends throughout the history of the building as a distinct upstanding feature wheres the NW platform becomes less and less discernible. This is the opposite to the situation in Building 1 where the roles were reversed. The reason for this is unclear but one scenario is that the NW platform is a favoured burial location but the SW platform is not. Is the pattern of which platforms remain as distinct pronounced features throughot the history of a building related to the number of burials in a building?
We will manage to do a litle bit more digging but we will have to shift the emphasis to recording soon.Entered By: Craig Cessford |
