| Entry: | Excavation in the units with much soil went slowly today as the two sifting workman were missing. DLG continued U.15358, CMB and DKK continued U.15357. HLS continued going down and finding the cut in pit F.3331. It is now rather clear that there must be another pit cutting into the southeastern part of pit F.3331 and also in the southwestern part of the pit HLS excavated yesterday (U.15353, 15354). This pit has no number yet as we are not sure whether we will actually excavate it.
JFB finished documenting and taking out the skeleton of F.3340.
JHB finished cleaning the sections in Sp.342, which are very interesting. The southern section shows the cut of burial F.3340, layers in the room fill and the upper limit of the room fill (with topsoil over it). The western section shows three pits cutting each other, cutting into the upper part of wall F.2426 and of F.3311, which is not yet clear but probably was not a bench but a constructional feature reaching further up and further into the room before it was cut by a massive pit containing reddish burnt brick.
Also layers of room fill are visible in the section, interestingly not all of them running horizontally, but some sloping down and up with the lowest part roughly in the present (artificial) corner of the room fill. Also, these layers never cover the whole of the room. This section confirms our impressing of the room fills so far excavated in Trench 5, which seem to be the complex result of numerous small scale depositional events.
PTW started excavating in Space 453 by clarifying the mud brick lump/ floor rest U.18349. It turned out that the unit seems to be a construction or maybe the leftover of a construction that was cut, showing two layer of pale yellowish plaster above each other with fill in between. Under the upper plaster layer and next to the second layer there were two large and articulated animal spines and two horns along with smaller fragments of bones and large pot sherds (cluster U.15363). DCO came into the trench to have a look at the bones. The whole arrangement looked like and intentional deposition either under/next to a (cut?) installation or a deposition that was plastered over.
RHB continued excavating in Space 345 (U.15174), carefully as she found two large and several small sherds of unfired pottery in the room fill. These were lying horizontally on a level on which also several large fired pot sherds were found. The level might represent the interface between two layers of deposition.
EMM continued excavating the room fill (U.15362) in Space 449. The level she is on at the moment seems to consist of the lowermost clay balls of cluster U.15343 along with layers underneath. In the south eastern part of the room, the fill contains several medium-sized fragments of red plaster which most probably were deposited in the room at the same time. The rest of the room fill under 15343 consists of the “usual” components such as greyish silt, pale yellow clay, spots of lime and charcoal, pot sherds, animal bones.
XHB started excavating the passage way (?) between F.3335 and F.3321 and the fill north of this which is inside the trench. He noticed that F.3320 is sitting on fill, the upper cm of which he exposed today (U.15364). He also found a flatish plaster piece that might represent a floor, of which we had several in this small room (Sp.446, actually only the part of the room inside the trench is small, the full outlines are not clear at all) and is following it.
BOD continued excavating in the centre of B.98. Her U.15361 represents the upper cm of fill in the northern half of Sp.450 and the southwesternmost part of Sp.452. Within a depth of only 5cm she encountered a complex pattern of depositions, starting with several large pot sherds on the western edge of Sp.450, to the east of which there are two suspicious depositions marked by their colour. To the north, there are several patches/lumps of pale yellow plaster with linear limits, directly to the south of this there is a seemingly rectangular patch of reddish clay. In the “passage” between Spaces 450 and 452 she saw several red painted pieces of plaster lying flat, which showed up in the mini-section during excavating. Supposedly these were deposited on the surface of a lower layer of infill. BOD therefore started to expose this plaster pieces cluster. |
