| Entry: | Thursday 21st July we continued excavating in the trench extension. DLG continued U.15358 west of Sp.343 and 342. DKK, CMB and EMM continued the massive U.15357 over the southern part of Sp.342, where JFB also excavated, documented and removed the skull of burial F.3340 along with some other parts of that person. JHB, RHB and HLS drew the pit situation over Sp.454 and south of Sp.345 (F.3331, U.15355, 15353, 15354, U.15185, F.5058).
In the later part of the day we spent some time cleaning the trench after all the sand bags had been taken out and had some visitors, including the Team Poznan.
Today 23rd July was a very exciting day as we started digging inside the buildings.
EMM returned to her clay ball paradise in Sp.449, started taking out another arbitrary layer of room fill (U.15362) to further expose the lower part of the cluster U.15344. It turns out that the clay ball cluster actually also has other artefacts in it, such as pot sherds and pieces of red painted plaster. Some large stones in the southeast corner of the room might stratigraphically belong to the cluster (that is, came into the room at the same time) or might have come into the room earlier, before the clay balls were deposited on them. Some of the clay balls are lying directly next to the plaster of wall F.3324 and actually are pressed into it a bit. EMM intended to expose the cluster for documentation when finding some unusual whitish plaster forms in the southwest corner of the room. We had some discussions about whether or not this might represent a floor. Plaster lumps, also large ones, are a regular inclusion of Trench 5 room fills and most probably represent discarded buildings materials. This plaster is fairly large and flat, though. So far the plaster lump or structure has only been excavated in a small area, so we have to see further tomorrow. If it is a floor, ist surface is irregular and it has some "holes" in it.
BOD started a sondage in the northern half of Sp.450 (U.15361) n order to find a possible floor of the room and create a section of the room fill that should help to identify layers in the fill and excavate them stratigraphically correct.only 3-5cm below the level we stopped excavating last year she found very large pot sherds and lumps of orange clay, whitish plaster and a chunk of red painted plaster lying flat. Altogether, the situation looks suspicious, as the lumps form lines are have rectangular forms. They might represent some kinds of structures, or a floor, but there also are sherds sticking inside the possible floor level and the structures do have holes that cannot be the result of rodent activities. Also here, more excavation is necessary. Exposing the plaster without cutting into it takes a lot of time.
RHB started excavating a layer of room fill (U.15174) in Sp.345, finding many large sherds in clusters along with the typical ingrediences of the room fills such as differents kinds of clay, limy spots, charcoal. The sherds a interesting as they are lying nearly flat and three of them (out of ca.6-7 large sherds found so far) had ring bases. The sherds are being exposed as a cluster. RHB also found and unusual small find, a stamp-like (similar to "pintaderas" as these artefacts are called in Anatolian archaeology) artefact made from rather light stone, but without incised decoration on the flat side.
HLS continued working on the pit 15353/15354, whose outlines are very unclear. In the northern part, the cut is clear as it cut into wall F.2427. In the southern part, the cut is unclear, as the pit might have cut or was cut by yet another pit. We therefore stopped the excavating of this pit to approach the problem from the other side, that is pit F.3331. HLS started taking out the upper layer of fill in this pit (U.15355).
CMB and DKK continued U.15357, taking it down to the preserved top of wall F.2424 which became visible today. The wall is rather thin and not totally linear, but slightly curved in parts. DLG continued U.15358 and was trained on the Total station.
JFB continued burial F.3340, finding the nearly complete lower body. Therefore, it now is clear that the feature represents and actual burial, whose cut in visible in the southern room fill section of Sp.342.
JHB cleaned the sections of Sp.342 which turned out to be much more interesting than expected. So far, we saw a probable pit filled by homogeneous reddish burtn brick over the northwest corner of the room, cutting into a mudbrick structure that was though to be a bench (F.3311) but might actually have been larger and higher, as parts of it are visible in section south of the supposed bench. The possible pit would then have cut this structure nearly rectangularly in the vertical and horizontal. |
