| Entry: | Today PTW and myself continued in space 343 excavating 18314. Beneath this rather sterile layer of compact rubble consisting of broken mudbrick, clumps of marly plaster, burnt mudbrick frags, we cut into a layer (which has not yet been assigned a unit number) which was fairly homogenous, very compact dark grey fill. This has been exposed in its northern limits of the space and will be exposed fully tomorrow after peeling off the remnants of 18314.
The walls surrounding space 343 (F.2426, 2425, 5050 and 2428) appear to directly overly another wall. The upper part of the wall, the latter feature numbers just mentioned, are defined by their thicker, compact reddish brown layer of clumpy mortar. Further down, the wall changes quite distinctly on all three sides of space 343; the bricks appear to be thinner and separated by a thin layer of light greyish mortar whose consistency is not too dissimilar from the mudbrick that it separates (making it very difficult to excavate!). In the north-western area of space 343, near the stepped limits of the excavation, the earlierr wall is not visible in the north. The later wall directly overlies the earlier wall on the souther and eastern sides of space 343, but not in the north (where at the moment it appears run parallel to the later wall, abutting it on the other side). This may indicate that the earlier wall is from a separate phase, and not necessarily the use of different mudbricks to form the same wall.
SO and EMM continued to excavate in space 345 where they found several small finds in units 18331, 18332 and 18335. Their space appears to be taking on a similar character to space 310 and 342, where clusters of potsherds and small finds are appear and the fill is rich in animal bone inclusions. JMR was lifting her cluster units in space 310 today with an aim to continue excavating the fill in order to expose the base of the space. ER and SRW continued in space 342 to remove the brownish layer 18328, while JFB exposed and recorded the baby skeleton 18333. The head of the baby (neonate?) was underneath a grinding stone, was laid prone on its stomach and later appeared to be associated with a concentration of phytoliths (around the head). 18333 appears to be associated with layer and event 18328 because no burial cut or fill is discernable. |
