| Entry: | Spent today back in space 342. A combination of careful cleaning of (arbitrary layer) unit 18311 and intentional overcutting of a pair of pits (to reveal snapshots of vertical stratigraphy) either side of the space's northern buttress (i.e. immediately east and west of feature 5061) with OMV allowed the identification of a potential second 'bench' feature extending from the buttress (feature 5061) to the west along the southern face of the northern wall (feature 5051) - this intriguingly mirrored the possible 'bench' (identified during excavation of unit 18310) extending south from the eastern section of the northern wall (feature 5051) along the western face of the eastern wall (feature 2424) that I discussed in my diary entry of 09/08/2009. The second bench-like feature has not yet been further investigated: its study would certainly be interesting in terms of West Mound architecture, but would involve violating the new step along 690m east. Given the greater ease of investigating the first 'bench' (unit 18310), pursuing this second one will presumably be left to some future date.
The cleaning and overcutting was undertaken with a view to assessing whether units 18311 and 18310 (the latter including the eastern [first] bench-like feature) were lying immediately on top of a collapsed floor - which had been suspected by OMV et al yesterday. As a precaution unit 18311 was split into a metre square grid, and OMV and I carefully excavated down into the unit in an effort to discern a brown layer (the possible floor) whose existance had been suggested by a brown patch exposed yesterday along the northern few centimetres of interface between 18310 and 18311. No floor was identified and the grid (and according separation of finds within unit 18311) was abandoned. OMV moved into space 343 and ER and I continued with the excavation of 18311.
Space 342 is clearly becoming increasingly interesting; unit 18311 has so far yielded a concentration of large potsherds, in many cases with several sherds from the same vessel, and disproportionately few small sherds - and only very few have been small enough to escape identification during excavation and been found only during the the dry sieving process. The most obvious implication of this - according with the faunal lab's interpretation of disproportionate quantities of articulated and/or unscavenged bone in higher layers - would seem to be that the fill events of space 342 have indeed each taken place over a relatively short timeframe. It seems impossible at this stage, however, to offer a prediction regarding the timescale of the various 342 fill events in their entirety.
The hypothesis of IF and OMV that space 342 represents some sort of pottery production area also gained support through the recovery of several fragments of an unfired but painted ceramic vessel - IF will investigate this in the ceramics lab.
(TBC) |
