| Entry: | SRW and Ümriye were excavating room fill layer 18314 (space 343), taking it back to the new step on easting 691. This extends north and the remainder will be excavated once PTW finalises recording his suspected pit cut 18306. EMM and SO completed excavating room fill arbitrary layer 18313 in space 340 where they recovered a figurine (X4) and an incised potsherd (X3). Cut 18317 was recorded yesterday and subsequently removed today with SRW's removal of fill layer 18314.
JMR continued to excavate units 18303 and 18316 in space 310 where she stopped to record the find clusters 18316, 18319, 18320, 18321 and 18322 embedded in room fill layer 18318 beneath. IF came out to take various samples of that were identified as clay, lime and potentially red ochre. In 18316 several small finds were recovered including stone, a fragment of a grinding stone, as well as a well worked bone item provisionally identified as a burin.
OMV stopped excavating room fill 18311(beneath 18309) in order to record in space 342. ER was excavating more decorated plaster lumps, which are more likely to be doab than plaster, in space 342. Overall, the excavation in Trench 5 is maintaining total dry sieving for all units except those confidently identified as natural disturbance, with theoretically 100% recovery of all finds. The pace of digging is good although it has the potential to increase if more heavy tooling was adopted, treating room fills as single units and taking them down more swiftly - we will see how things progress once all the later natural intrusions and disturbances have been sorted in order to establish good clean room fill units to lift. |
