| Entry: | Another exciting day in Trench 5.
DLG started cleaning the plastered face of wall F.3344 (removed fill U.16930). Afterwards, the base of the wall became visible; it is sitting on very homogeneous grey fill. It looks nearly like nicely sieved soil and most probably represents an intentional filling (preparing for the erection of the wall?). Just east of F.3344 and parallel to it, DLG found another wall, made from dark greyish brick with no mortar visible yet. The material looks similar to those of the walls surrounding Space 462 (F.3304, F.3305, F.3306), on top of which the walls surrounding Sp.343 (F.2426, F.2425/5050, F.5074) were built, which were construction of the same material as F.3344. So, what does this mean? Either F.3344 does not belong with Space 343, but with another building. Or it goes with F.2426, F.2425/5050 and F.5074, surrounds the upper Space 343, but was not built directly on top of the older wall (F.3348) surrounding the lower Space 462, but moved a bit towards west to enlarge building Sp.343 as compared to Space 462.
BOD spent more hard time trying to recognise construction features in Space 462 (removed fill U.15394). It now seems clear that we already see the bases of walls F.3304 and 3305 and of buttresses F.3337 and F.3339 (excavation in the the northern part of the room is still on a higher level). We cut into the fill underneath those features by ca. 4-5cm. No floor. The fill under the walls seems to be made up from brick material and a lot of the lumpy red mortar found in the walls surrounding Sp.343. It might represent another intentional infilling in preparation of building construction, but it also contains large sherds and much bone.
XHB finished exposing the plaster of F.3320 and found that the feature has a very uneven base, still continuing down into unexcavated fill in the south and sitting on ca.15cm of fill in the north. This supports the interpretation of all these small wall features surrounding Space 446 (F.3320, F.3321, F.3335) as being hasty and unplanned constructions, at least compared to the other construction features we had in Trench 5 so far. ER had similar impressions when taking out F.3334, whose mortar and bricks are not very regularly set and which contains many sherds, bone and even some fragments of red painted plaster.
Afterwards, XHB moved over to the gap between F.3335 and F.3321 (the doorway??), where he spotted a very thin plaster line and cleared away the fill south of it. The plaster (U.16941) turned out to be applied to something north of it (fill? brick?) and lipping out in the bottom. Is this the plastering of a doorstep/threshhold?
EMM continued her layer of room fill in Space 449, which contains many beautiful ground stones artefacts, something new even to the find rich Space 449 (U.16936).
Space 342 gets ever more interesting. JHB and CMB removed the rest of the fill lense (U.15360) they started excavating yesterday. Afterwards, three different contexts were visible, a homogeneous yellowish layer with inclusions of black and white, a loose layer with more colours and a lot of larger pot sherds. We were unsure whether these contexts were layers/lenses next ot each other or on top of each other cut in an angle or whether one of them is a pit. Therefore JHB made a little directors window to follow them down a bit. It turned out that the grey context was cut into the other two lenses. He took the fill out (U.16940) and identified the feature as a large and longish animal
burrow.
Having a closer look at the two sections in the room, we noticed that layer identifiable as undisturbed prehistoric room fill go over buttress F.5062. Therefore, the buttress must have been cut before or during the infilling process during the Chalcolithic. This observation made my suspicion that the events which cut the top of wall F.5051 and F.3346 in the northwest corner of the room also happened during the Chalcolithic even more probable. CMB therefore started taking out the well visible pit with reddish fill (cut: 16943, fill: 16937) that cut into these two walls and probably in the western wall of the space, too. This pit might be Chalcolithic and therefore very exciting and furthermore will allow a little window into the expected western wall of 342. That this wall must be close can be inferred from the fact that another wall became visible today when JHB and CMB cleaned the western section of the trench. This wall consists of medium grey brick with whitish grey mortar and therefore most probably belongs with another building (neighbouring Space 342 in the west), running parallel to the western wall of Space 342, which must be close behind the current section in the space, but can be expected to be overlain by another 30cm of room fill, just as buttress F.5062.
The workmen and I removed late disturbances (U .16934) over walls F.3345 and F.3341. F.3345 shows up quite nicely, F.3341 still seems disturbed from the northern side, though. The cut of the disturbance is so clear and the fill of the disturbance so homogeneous and firm that we might maybe just be running into another deliberate Chalcolithic wall destruction??
HLS continued to clean floor/surface U.16932 in Space 454 (?). The fill peel of some roughly horizontal layer, that is not plaster, though, but reddish compact fill. The peeling is so obvious and can be followed over a larger area that the stuff underneath must be something. A floor? A trampelled surface? The pit bottow? We will find out.
JFB and RHB took a lot of fill out of burial F.3342, but only found some scattered baby bones so far. A rodent burrow enters the mud brick construction from the SE corner and might have caused the scattering. We still hope to find an undisturbed skeleton further down, though. |
