| Entry: | As we decided to remove F. 3334 completely, the unit sheets needed rewriting, which proved to be a good occasion to test the new digitizing pen Asa and Bjorn have brought with them to try under real life circumstances. 16925 and 16926 were recorded in this way, and I really wonder how the pen deals with my handwriting, way of sketching etc. It was great fun, although the thing is a bit thick and gave me cramps writing. As the gadget records not only what I write, but also much time it takes me to do so, when I have a break, when I get interrupted, when I have to look up a level in an old drawing, spend time thinking etc., I felt a littlle as if Big Brother was watching me. Geeeee, it is now recorded forever how long it took me to find the unit stratigraphically above 16925 and 16926 which was dug last year and how many times I changed my texture description from silt to silty sand to sandy silt... But I think this is more than outweighed by the fact that this system would save us all most of the tedious copying of all unit sheets into the database and scanning all the sketches!
While removing F. 3334, it became clear that it is later than both buttress F. 5052 (the leaning buttress which we will want an entrance fee of 5 YTL for from now on) and wall F. 3335. The white wall plaster XHB exposed on it facing space 446 seems to continue behind the fill under 3334 which we call 16929 and will be removed next. No wall plaster was preserved behind 3334, so it seems they stripped the wall plaster 3335 away before they put the bench 3334 in front of it. This is a common preactice on the East Mound, as Roddy told me. And it would fit perfectly our building material recycling theories for the West Mound.
As for the immense bell-shaped pit F. 3331, I had a talk with Mustafa who came over to the trench yesterday about its possible function. I told him what Korfmann wrote in his Demircihüyük volume about how such pits were used to store the grain needed for sowing in the next spring (it is called tohumluk" in turkish), and he agreed, saying that his grandfather had still done in in this way. When I told this to IF today, he said quite rightly that this means that the pit must be later than the cemetery, as no one stores grain in a cemetery. So my best guess as to the date of the whole thing is that it belongs to all the pit-digging for storage on the West Mound that Sadrettin told me about in 2006 or 2007.
As to the walls of building 98 (with the exception of the "normal" walls 3335 and 3332), Lisa-Marie had said they are fill that was cut back in the shape of a building and the plastered. This is soothing, as in 2008, we had thought it was fill and removed some of it. JMR and I think they are made bay wet mudbricks without mortar. Burcu, however, says that she thinks it is rammed earth. The construction variation project is going to be really interesting! |
