| Entry: | DLG and JFB finished the drawing of burial F.3342 today. Afterwards, JFB proceeded to excavate the other burial (F.3347) in the disturbed fill above Sp.342. DLG tried to follow wall F.3344 southwards and noticed that is is cut by a pit that also cut wall F.2426, the southern wall of Space 343. He started to take out the fill of that pit (U.15397, cut: U.15396).
CMB continued removing U.15379, which represents a mixture of parts of wall F.3345, lumps of brick and mortar that have the same colour as the features making up Space 342 and many many pits and disturbances. Today, we decided to cut everything flat, as the few patches of in situ wall left in this area are to small and disturbed to see anything. A pit that we saw in the excavation section contained at least one of the lumps of wall we found all over the area, together with tile and stone. This dates the event that destroyed the walls of Sp.342 and left them in lumps in the upper room fill to Byzantine times, not to the Chalcolithic. Maybe the wall destruction was done while cutting some of the pits we saw in this area, and afterwards the fragmts of wall were deposited in the pit(s).
JHB continued to excavate the northwestern corner of Space 342 (U.15359). On Thursday we thought that we now had found all the wall features (F.5051, F.3346) in this area, but there is more. We kept scraping around a lump of dark grey mud brick and marl until we noticed that it is a mudbrick, cut from the top. The brick abuts F.3346, in ist limits defined on Thurday, from the south, both features form a linear border in the east, but the new brick does not seem to have the same width on the western side. We still have to expose more of it to find out what it is and whether it belongs with F.3346. I am more concerned abuout the mayn pits in this area, which cut the upper part of F.3345 and the new brick and apparently some of the northernmost part of buttress F.5062. We scraped around it today to remove all the non-buttress fill sticking to it; it has a very thick and firm plaster coating in the undisturbed parts. These pits seem to be post-Prehistoric, because of the very homogeneous fill with reddish brick in them. On the other hands, the pit fills are not cleary separatable from the also quite reddish fill of Space 342 on the present level.
BOD finished cleaning Space 462 today. We sprayed the area to see outlines of the buttresses. F.3337, the southern buttresses, is only visible in plan to far. Both F.3338 and F.3339 have been partially exposed in 2009, but the spraying showed dark patches around the exposed buttresses, indicating that they were larger in plan than seen previously. F.3338 seems to be larger than the other two, or alternatively, colour differences might show a construction surrounding the buttress on three sides (S, W and N). Altogether, the buttresses seem to by as massive compared to the room size as in Building 98, forming small compartments. No sing yet of the western buttress.
DKK exposed cluster U.15389 in Space 340, which has a lot of interesting stuff in it and after a photo took out the upper "layer" of finds. There was more under it, including several clay balls.
RHB continued U.15174 in Space 345, which still contains many interesting finds such as an irregular axe-like stone artefact and more unfired pottery.
HLS took out a lot of fill from pit F.3331 today, now she is nearly on the level to which the northern half was dug down in 2010. The fill does not contain much finds. We wondered what the original fill of the pit was - did they really just put a lot of grey clayey silt in here, mixed with some Chalcolithic sherds, some stones and tile?
EMM took out the upper layer of the layer with burnt plaster (U.15380) in Space 449, documenting the inclusions and section of the fragments. She also spent some time clearing finds from walls F.3324 and F.3333. Some clay balls and a large grinding stone were sticking partially inside these walls, the grinding stone by some centimeters. It does not seem impossible that several thousands years of pressure and earth movements can press finds into walls, but also the consistency of wall F.3333 seems to change at this level, maybe indicating that the wall is sitting on fill or another wall.
XHB Is going crazy in Sapce 446. Now he has four to five floors on top of each other, with no or few fill in between them, some pale yellow and some dark orange plaster floors. It seems entirely unclear what events led to the construction of some many floors on top of each other. The floor levels never coincide with the base of wall F.3320; the ones dug last year were above this level (U.15171, U.15191) and the new ones are under it (15388, 15395, 15397, 15398, 15399, 16241). Unfortunately the southern parts of the floors are disturbed and the northern and eastern not inside the trench. Also, most of Space 446 is not in the trench. |
