| Entry: | First day of the last week, lots of problems solved today! As we got excellent results in defining the architectural pattern this year, we decided to not push ourselves down to floors etc. where we might hit a lot of interesting and time-consuming structures. As there's plenty of stuff that has to be dug because of half-exposed fragile finds, and a lot of walls have to be drawn, we will work in the afternoons, too. Ismail retrieved a tiny grey stone with a hole in unit 17216 (a bead?) from the sieve today, so there should be absolutely no concerns about his sieving. The shepherd tending the Kucukkoy cows in the plain between the mounds came over to have a cup of tea with us at breakfast.
PFB, DEL and me continued 16896 in space 342, coming down to a pretty smooth-looking surface in the S part, while the N part of the trench still looks very rubbly. It also contains pieces of red painted plaster, probably coming from a nicely painted upper storey (?). I seems as if the theory of unpainted pottery and painted walls on the East Mound as opposed to painted pottery and unpainted walls in the West Mound is really dead now. Trench 8 is the best example. Plaster 17201 is heavily disturbed in most places, but continues further down in some areas of wall 2424 and buttress 5063. Have to see if that surface continues under the rubbly stuff of 16896 or not. In the corner of walls 5051 and 2424 a dark grey layer was oberserved by DEL and dug as 17215. We defined the edges of the pit 17226 (fill) and 17227 (cut) that cuts both into wall 5051 and the roomfill 16896. Only a few centimeters away from the edge of the pit sits the baby skeleton 16835 exposed in the cut 15317. We can tackle that now as the roomfill 16896 is down to that level, and I exposed its relationship to wall 5051. Basak and Brenda came over after lunch and had a look at it: it is lying on its right side, skull in the W, the vertebrae neatly abutting the plaster 17201 of space 342. There is a patch of grey clay surrounding the skeleton. I called this soil 17229 in order to have a unit that I can sample and take to flotation while exposing the skeleton tomorrow, but whether this soil is the fill of an organic container (some phytoliths are coming up, too) or just another patch within 16896 remains to be clarified.
The problem of the missing corners of spaces 340 and 341 is solved now - the division walls of the two spaces, 5053 and 5054, are not two walls, but a single huge buttress - plaster surrounds the two rows of bricks on the E side. We all heaved a big sigh, and JMR exposed the buttress fully by taking away a chunk of still very mixed soil containing some human bones as unit 17222. We can now safely assume that walls 5052 and 5057 are buttresses, too, which solves a lot of open questions about the borders of spaces in the East of the trench. Hooray! Another pending issue was wall 5056 - a courageous cleaning back by almost 10cm by KJK finally revealed a massive wall, and while drying first indivdual bricks started to appear. Space 340 and 341 now make perfect sense as open spaces within a huge buttressed building. I am completely amazed about the ongoing canhasanification of our trench.
SO, thus within this building, documented and lifted the cluster of finds 17213, and taking out some sediment around it (17216, which contained a handful of snails) showed yet another potstand under the lugged pot, and this surely sits in a roomfill 17225, to be dug tomorrow. In the NE corner of the trench, JJW drew the walls that appeared there and is ready for taking out part of the roomfill as 17228 tomorrow to get it down to the end level of 16885. The roomfill seems to spread S into a gap between mudbricks. This gap, however, is blocked by another structure that further S is cut by cut 16892 of grave 5060. If these mud structure turns out to be the continuation of the wall of the buttressed building that cmprises space 340 and 341 as well as SO's space, this building must be later than the space that contains 17228. Exciting.
In the SE corner of the trench, in most likley another bulding, as he is workig three rows of mudbrick apart from SO, RBW sorted out walls 5067 and 5068 that appeared after excavating grave 2419 and started to dig down a corner of roomfill that was left untouched by the grave cut as 17217. In space 343, MB finished pit 17211, which was very shallow and square. So all disturbances in that space are gone now. Did I really write almost two pages just about one single day? Amazing. |
