| Entry: | After a day's pause, I continued excavating the floor in unit 15341. The first thing I noticed this morning was that the plaster had dried out on some areas and had started cracking. In order to prevent this situation from getting worse in the coming days, I covered the floor with plastic bags at the end of today's session, so that direct exposure to sunlight and further evaporation of the moisture in the soil is avoided. I exposed the southern end of the floor, although this is by no means a clear-cut edge. Rather, the dark orangey-yellow plaster that the floor is made up of fades away gradually, becoming a dark greyish-brown sandy silt. The boundary between the two types of soil is very irregular in shape. A section of the floor was made. It terms of its construction, it could be argued that a layer of rubble (chunks of red and white plaster, mostly) was first laid down, followed by a thick first layer of dark orangey-yellow plaster, which was probably repaired at a later date by adding a second layer of the same material. At the end of the day I worked for a few minutes on the western side of the floor, a task I shall carry on with tomorrow.
On the other hand the removal of the fill (U.15342) to the south of the floor did not shed much light on the existence of mudbricks adjacent to the plaster line running in an E-W direction (only roomfill was found), which is our only evidence for the existence of a wall on that area of the trench so far. Therefore, the existence of a wall to the south of the floor (U. 15341) and the connection between each other is still dubious. |
