| Entry: | I drew a plan of the top level of 18326 today, which will be the next spit of roomfill in Sp 310. While doing so, I had to take back my impression that the fill was now more homogeneous than beforehand. A new thing are spots of reddish soil, I still do not know what this is.
There are still a lot of animal burrows and still large sherds which might turn out to be new clusters or continuations of the previous ones.
After that, I drew the lower part of the south section which had not been exposed last year and after that cut back the section ca.7cm and gave a thourough scrape to the lower parts of the walls in the North (2408), East (2427) and West (5058) of the space.
It turned out that I am now already under the bose of these three walls. PFB, ER and me discussed if the feature underneath the walls was a mudbrick construction, so maybe the foundation of the wall or an earlier phase similar to the situation in Sp 343. At the moment I believe that it is not, because of several large sherds sticking deeply in the fill under wall 2408 and because this soil also contains a lot of lumps of yellow clay, just as the room fill in Sp310 does. PFB and ER identified some mudbricks, but also did not know what to make of this ca 10cm. Part with the sherds sticking in the "wall".
A look at the freshly cleaned South section showed that the base level of the three walls matches perfectly the limit between two layers: The upper part of the room fill contains so many of the yellow clay lumps that it looks very yellow in total (16898), while the lower part is more greyish-brown (17214). AHW did notice this last year while digging at therefore separated the two units 16898 and 17214. What is a bit irritating is that in the section it seems as if several sherds were lying directly on this interface between the two layers, while only one is sticking in it. As already said in the previous diary entries, there was no point, however, while excavating last year at which no large sherds were sticking in the fill. Therefore the lower, darker layer cannot be a floor. It would also be strange for a floor to contain kilos of pottery and animal bones.
The section also shows the the supposed butress in the SE of the trench (F.3302) is also undercut already and its base coincides with the upper level of the grey-brown layer. The base of the butress/wall it is does not look straight, though. When cleaning the profile, the vertical plaster line marking its western limit became very clearly visible - it was not beforehand thanks to several animal holes.
The other butress/wall sticking in the profile SW of 310 (F.3301) however is still going deeper, as the thick white plaster indicates.
My first thoughts were that 3301 is the oldest feature limiting a space that was much larger than 310 and that the other four walls were added later. If that was true, I was now excavating in an arbitrary space and this thought is a bit frustrating. As the clusters of finds, however, are a feature that was visible both over and underneath the base level of 5058, 2408, 2427 and 3302 it might be that we did not miss the change between two layers or phases of activity. |
