| Entry: | Now that we got down to the top levels of walls almost eveywhere in T5, more and more people in the trench get their individual space to dig. RBW and JJW, however, had to stay in today. Good to have AWH to tend the Total Station! The shading shed is really a bit of a mess, as the rubber straps in no year so far seemed to survive for more than two weeks, causing the canvases to flap in the wind. For photography, gaps between the shading canvases are hold together by helping hands, and holes are closed by shovels being held up. The occcasional small tornado twisting along the West Mound road is not very helpful either. Hope to get a proper tent (at best a mobile one so we can take overview shots from a ladder from time to time before the sun is up) next year.
AWH digs down grey and white roomfill in 310 as unit 16898 and retrieves lots of nice small finds.
KJK's and JMR's spaces 341 (unit 16879) and 340 (unit 16880) are way more earthy, most probably because it does not have so much plaster on its walls. KJK takes down 16879 down to the level of where she yesterday finally found the corner of walls 5057 and 5054 under the disturbance 16861.
The space defined by the W and N profiles as well as walls 2424 and 5051 was named 342, TEB and DEL continued digging the roomfill as 16896 today, and I had lots of fun exposing the plaster on buttress 5063. The buttresses of that space measure 80 by 40 cm, which is very similar to the brick size of Can Hasan 2B. The roomfill contains huge potsherds and bones in extremely nice preservation (due to the high chalk content of the plaster lumps, like in space 310), some in a cluster (16899), and most of them have phytoliths attached. The uppermost layer of bricks of walls 2424 as well as 5051 (unit 16847) seems way more crumbly and ashy than the lower courses (unit 17207), and seems to overlie 16896. Did we just get a glimpse of a second wall phase here?
Space 343 was defined as between walls 2426, 5050 and the EW walls at the N profile. The fill there still looks quite mixed, with an occasional iron nail coming up. But SO and MB do not loose their temper, fortunately!
The Selcuk team lifted what was left of the badly disturbed skeleton 17200 in grave 5060 close to the E profile today. Their unit 16894 which was first defined as a pit underlying the arbitrary layer 16884 was redefined as a still very mole-holed roomfill which extends from the E profile up to wall 5057. Cut 16895 was therefore abandoned. Hope the S wall and maybe even the W wall (if it is not hidden under the E profile) appears tomorrow. There are some nice finds such as a potstand and a vessel with lugs sitting in that roomfill. |
