| Entry: | Our excavation team is slightly reduced, as some members were called away to lab duties, but the trench is still very rewarding.
HLS continued exposing the floor in Space 454. It turned out that the fill we left because we interpreted it as original Chalcolithic room fill peels from a roughly flat surface of greyish fill. The yellowish white plaster floor (U.16932) discovered yesterday is found still 1-3cm below this peeling surface. Today, we interpreted the surface to be the bottom of pit F.3331, whose cut gratefully stopped just above the floor, at least in the southern part of the room; in the north and northeast, the floor is disturbed and the pit might be responsible for this. HLS therefore proceeded to take out the rest of the fill of pit F.3331 (U.16928), which we did not identify as pit fill earlier. In the porcess, we had to remove the badly disturbed upper part (ca.20cm) of wall F.2427, which otherwise had collapsed down the undercutting pit border. She then scraped the very thin fill directly above the floor (U.16933) in order to expose the plaster. This fill above floor should in theory be undisturbed Chalcolithic room fill, but this cannot be securely said about a unit only 3-4thick. It is also possible that the pit was dug down to the floor and that U.16933 represents some pre-depositional alteration of the pit bottom. It is not probable that the floor goes with the pit, as it is connected to wall F.2427.
XHB and ER finished taking out F.3334, so that XHB can tomorrow remove the fill in Space 452 left under the feature and then excavate in 452 to approach the possible treshhold/ door step U.16941 from the south and make it clearer.
EMM continued the arbitrary layer of fill in Space 449 (U.16936) when she encountered a spot in the north of her room where fill peeled naturally from a roughly even surface of fill underneath. We decided to separate the fill (U.16942) on top of the surface (U.16947) and the artefacts directly on the surface (U.16948) from the arbitrary layer U.16936 and to follow the surface. By the end of the day, EMM had exposed it on a large part in the northeastern part of the room. The surface is flat, but sloping in some directions and has a variety to nice artefacts lying on it.
DLG continued the unit started by BOD in Space 462 (U.15394), exposing mud brick features. He identified a cluster of mud bricks, possibly representing collapse, in the southeast corner of the room (U.16945). Such large brick lumps were also encountered during the rest of the unit in the last days, but we did not identify them as collapse, but as disposed building material brought from somewhere else. Now we have to re-evaluate this interpretation.
CMB continued to take out the pit that cut the northwest corner of Space 342 (cut: 16943, fill:16937) which turned out to contain stones, red burnt brick and human bone and therefore can be identified as another Byzantine pit, which is ashame as ist very flat bottom cutting precisely F.3346 and F.5051 led my to suspect some Chalcolithic building abandonment behaviour. No sign of the western wall of the space yet, but the pit is also not yet emptyand ist border not really clear.
JHB started to take out a context in the room fill of Sp.342 (U.16938) which is defined by ist loose consistency, many colours and many sherds. It is not yet clear whether this is a pit or a lense. |
