| Entry: | I excavated another spit of 5cm in Sp 310 today (Unit 18303). Just as yesterday, huge amounts of large animal bones clustered in the NW corner of the space and along its W wall (F. 5058). As today also a lot of large pot sherds appeared, some of them sticking next to each other in the roomfill and making up halves of vessels, I decided to attribute a cluster number (18316) to the artefacts of this W part of the space. Furthermore, I found four ground stone artefacts (X1-X2, X4-X5) in the cluster and one beautiful, complete bone burin (X3).
While digging further to the E, large amounts of sherds also appeared towards the N side, E side and in the SW of the space. I decided to treat these as a clusters as well when removing the next spit tomorrow. Today however, all the finds from this corner were collected as 18303 as most of the clustering sherds are still sticking in the soil.
My space is right at the southern section of our trench, and after breakfast the sun is shining onto the southern half of it. This is a problem, because the soil is much dryer and harder here. Also, photos can only be taken in the morning and it might become difficult to see differences in the soil.
Gladly, DCO from the faunal lab joined us for some hours today in the trench and had a look at the bones from my space. They seem to be mostly from goat/ sheep and cattle, and as the preservation is so good, DCO suspects that they all were covered rapidly after being dumped into the space.
It seems that the space was used as a dump area for a period of time after it was not inhabited any more. It would seem logical that clay, lumps of mudbrick, lime, pottery, broken stone objects and kitchen rubbish was thrown into it from the N and mostly the NW corner, as finds cluster there. Was does not seem to fit into this hypothesis is the complete bone tool I found today. I am also not sure about the pottery; the sherds seem to fit together to about halves of vessels. So were was the other half discarded? And why were they not repaired?
We also had closer look on the walls today. On the wall in the N (F.2408) not plaster is visible any more, instead one yellowish line that we identified as mortar. As wall F. 5058 is cut by a pit and one therefore can look into it, we could ascertain that the walls of the space are indeed made up of greyish-brown mudbrick and yellowish mortar. Therefore, the walls continue but the thick plaster covers do not seem to continue when digging deeper. |
