| Entry: | Work finally started yesterday on taking down the sub-floor layers in Building 1; we have left Chad working on the final skeletons under platform F.13 and strung out the interior of the building on a 2 metre grid aligned to the main site grid. I have decided not to have any baulks but excavate opposing squares in order to get two running sections through the middle of the building (north-south and east-west) - these may even be composite sections depending on the practicalities of the job. Due to outside circumstances, Kate has now joined the North area team and Loiuse who I was to have for one more week, has gone to the Mellaart area. Furthermore, Charlotte has just been called back to Sweden and will leave at the end of the week which is a real shame although Kate (and Lucy) will make up the numbers. Kate and Charlotte have been moving huge amounts of soil in the past couple of days and the House is finally being transformed; between them, they have been working on the layers in Space 70 and taking down the partition wall F.3 and at last it actually looks as if something is happening - the trouble with the burials is they take so long and it looks as if very little is being achieved. Anyway, on the other side in Space 71, Ali, Naomi and myself have been working on taking these layers down with a little help from Dorothee and Ilhamey. So far, the composition of these subfloors layers appears very simple - a thin ashy layer with much charcoal and a fair quantity of finds which is of variable thickness but feathers out toward the eastern end of the building, which overlies a much thicker infill of relatively clean, broken up mudbrick and floor/wall plaster with less finds. I imagine it will take us most of the rest of the season to remove these deposits but hopefully we will finish with a confident picture of what is happening under the building in terms of continuity of place.Entered By: Gavin Lucas |
