| Entry: | This will be my last entry for the season; work finished today and tomorrow we will backfill. Things really started to slow down in the last couple of weeks, especially since my staff seemed to consist solely of Ali and Naomi. However, Chad returned to work on site for a couple of days, especially to cover for me on one when I took a very short break in Ankara last weekend. The site now stands at a good point to return to next year: the whole of Building 1 is empty and down to the same deposit (a levelling layer) which also seems to fill the spaces 69 and 73 either side of the building and it is at this level we have stopped there too. The remaining part of the wall F.3 is down (at last!) along with the wall paintings which took some time to complete due to the unexpected presence of actual paintings rather than simple red panels as presumed. Naomi worked chiefly on these with help at different times from Kate, Lucy and Ali. It proved worthwhile as some nice paintwork was identified in six phases (among some twenty layers in total), one of which, the most well exposed, was a geometric panel of red lozenges/triangles with black line lozenges. Indeed, all the paintwork appears to be geometric designs and occurs throughout the use of the building, at least until the very final phases which may relate to the reduced size of the building in the current phase III. Thus all the painted plaster probably goes with phases I and II but this will need checking with the cores we took and relating these to the floor layers.
Apart from the wall painting, work has concentrated on removing more of the fill below the building and we are now down fairly deep within the shell of Building 1 (well over 1m); these walls rest on another different course which originally we were thinking of as foundation bricks because they had no plaster on their face - indeed this may still be the case. Beneath these, in places is yet another course of brickwork which I have assumed belongs to the next building and certainly seems associated with the plaster we now have coming up on several faces. In places this course seems to greatly be set back from the 'foundation' course and it cannot be directly contemporary therefore. This does then suggest that either this middle course is foundation, or the remains of a missing building which has lost all its associated floors and plaster etc.. This latter however, seems unlikely - it is hard to imagine all trace of a building being eradicated. A deep sondage was dug (1m sq.) in the same place as Roger's last year to find the floors of the next building and these were finally located nearly a metre down from the present surface. This means we are faced with a depth problem and the safety of the walls which would stand nearly 2m high if we carried on down, so next year we may remove the upper courses of brickwork associated with Building 1 first. This would give us plently of space to the east and west, and a little step north and south; it would also mean we at least don't have 'old' stratigraphy still standing. Shahina warns of problems once walls are removed, especially as one isn't sure of what could be happening behind, but I think in this case we may be OK - the east and west walls are already nearly exposed both sides in the inter-building spaces 69 and 73, while the scrape plans show the north and south walls abutting buildings. Anyhow, we shall see.
In terms of the plan of the next building, it now seems that all the outer shell walls do continue down, albeit as mentioned, slightly set back from the present ones. The internal ones are now fully exposed in plan and show two opposed north-south walls with accesses between rooms at the north for the eastern one, and at the south for the western one. The western wall repeats in a bizarre way, that of F.3 above; I say bizarre because although we are always lead to think this is the way they built, such reiteration is still amazing - and it is more reiteration than continuity if you see what I mean. Anyway, this leaves the plan of the next building as tripartite: a large central square room with two rectangular side rooms. The most significant thing to say at present is that the central room has a very thick accumulation of plaster (many of which appear to be sooted) while the two side rooms have maybe no more than three or four. The same appears to be true of the floor of the western side room where the sondage was dug, which one can more or less obliterate in just a few trowel scrapes. The fill within this building appears to consist of fairly homogenous, rapid dumps of carefully chosen/mixed material - mainly broken up brick, mortar, plaster with the occasional ashy lense. This is very different to the room fill of Building 1 which was more akin to collaspe/demolition rubble but then this certainly says something about the way the two buildings ended their life and what was expected to happen in the space over them. In a way, the room fill of the next building down is probably part of the foundation make-up/activities for Building 1.Entered By: Gavin Lucas |
