| Entry: | Today DEL started documentation in space 342 while I dug into 17229 to expose more of the newborn skeleton 16835. The skull, however, appeared to continue further W than the white plastery chunks that form the boundaries of the clayey soil of 17299. So I think this patch of soil is just another part of the roomfill 16896. The legs could not be located, also when Basak and Brenna came out to have a look. They will lift the skeleton tomorrow morning. It appears to be part of all sorts of stuff that were deposited around the edges of the space 342 under the overhanging walls 5051 and 2424, as it is neatly abutting the plaster 17201 with its spine. The feature seems to lack the character of a proper burial and rather looks like a disposal of rubbish, so it provokes thoughts on how other cultures and how we deal with miscarriages and malformed children. As every skeleton has to have its grave fill according to the documentation system, 17229 serves as the surrounding fill unit that goes to flotation in its entire volume to retrieve minuscule bone fragments (except the small archive sample). The white patches S of the skeleton turned out to be just another piece of the ubiquitious phytoliths in roomfill 16896, and the red spot is another frag of red painted plaster sitting in 16896. Should take that out as a sample tomorrow.
In space 341, KJK cleaned back the E face of structure 5057 with 16859 by some cm to find out if the plaster that is visible in the planum a the N edge of the structure is actually going round it. Unfortunately it does not. However, she also exposed an NS running mudbrick edge on the W face of 5057 while digging with SO and MB into the roomfill 17225 that surrounds the cluster 17213. It indeed seems to form a corner with the EW running wall parallel to 5067. In space 340 JMR used 16880 to take down the roomfill to the level of the basal boundary of 16859. The continuation of buttress/wall 5052 towards the N and its relation to wall 2428 are still rather unclear because of the disturbance 16823. A plaster line visible in the cut 16893 shows that the structure has a clear end in the S. Thus I call it a buttress. Howgh. However, the buttress-non-believers are puzzled by the non 90-degree-look of the building the buttress-believers claim to see. But can you expect straight walls and corners from people who made mudbricks from refuse and put huge bone fragments into their mortar? And a look at Can Hasan 2B shows loads of unstraight corners, as e.g. the NW corner of building 2. And building 5, albeit way smaller than our proposed building, flashes assymetrically placed buttresses, another issue of the discussion today.
The space where RBW documented yesterday was called 345, and he took down a last triangle of roomfill 17217 that was untouched by the grave 2419 just in the corner of walls 5068 and 5067. JJW documented the still rather confusing walls situation in the NE corner of the trench and started to dig the roomfill as 17228 down to the end level of 16885. The roomfill of space 310, being taken further down with unit 17214 continues to harass AWH with a series of postherd clusters that stick vertically at the plaster and require constant drawing activities. I really wonder how that happened. |
