| Entry: | Apart from room fill excavation, we set out on a wall finding mission today, trying to define the walls in the trench extension that we have been seeing and feeling for a while, but which are still clouded by disturbances. We want to identify these walls this season and by this define spaces and buildings. First success: Space 342 is now Building 105!
PTW found the western wall of Space 342 (now Building 105, as we found its four outer walls) by levelling out the base of the pit cut U.16943 which cut very conveniently into a point where five walls/ construction features meet. It turned out that F.3346 is separated by a plaster line from F.3352, which is made up from the same dark grey brick and runs west of it. F.3352 was defined to be the western wall of Space 342/Building 105, as it runs further south than F.3346 and would line up perfectly to run behind buttress F.5062. However, it is cut in the south. We started scraping off disturbances here to find the southern continuation of the wall. F.3352 forms a neat outer corner and runs parallel to wall F.2426, which belongs to Space 343. I wonder how the builders managed to put two walls so perfectly next to each other that no gap whatsoever remains. Might this indicate that the walls were built at the same time?
North west of this corner formed by F.3352 and F.2426, there seems to be mixed up fill that also contains some lumps of mud brick. This might indicate that no building was abutting Sp.343 from the south, but there was an unroofed area or a filled in area west of it. This might be supported by the fact that we did not so far see a wall running west of F.3344, the western wall of Sp.343. The area is also very disturbed, though, and just below topsoil. Still unsolved is why we see two parallel walls west of F.3352 (F.3349, F.3350). We will not be able to solve this question this year, as most of the walls is out side of the trench.
So, we try to find the southern part of F.3352 and hope that it is not too disturbed. There cannot be much room fill left in between the current section within the room and the wall, maybe 5-7cm. The corner between F.3341 and F.3352, the southern and western walls of Space 342/Building 105 is disturbed by a massive Byzantine pit (part of U.16934) that we followed down ca.60cm already and that we will not finish taking out this year. Furthermore, we might expect some more Chalcolithic dismantling of construction feature, such as the activities that apparently removed the part of F.3341 facing towards the interior of the room.
DLG continued to take out room fill (U.16949) on top of the buttresses F.3307 and F.3337 in order to show their outlines, which is complicated, as expected, because their tops are very disturbed. He furthermore scraped off some fill left in the corner between F.3344 and F.2426 in order to show that they connect. The corner is not only eaten away by rodents, as usual, but also larger part of the part where the two walls meet had been removed by a pit (cut: U.15396). The few that remains show that the two walls seem to abut each other, but apparently with a layer of plaster left on the eastern face of F.3344. Would this mean that F.2426 was built later than F.3344 and that when F.3344 was built it was not yet anticipated that a wall would be built abutting it from the west? F.3344 might belong with an older construction we otherwise have no remains so far and might originally have been longer or otherwise different.
Space 343 has no four walls surrounding each other probably, but its northwest corner will not be excavated this year. The corner of F.3344 and F.5074 must be under the fill left under the removed burial F.3342 and will not come out this year. We will meditate about whether or not to attribute a building number already; finding the western buttress might be helpful, because then we can assume that the northwest corner does not hold any more surprises such as an adjacent room.
RHB and JFB while removing the mud brick of F.3343, which turned out to be an empty (robbed) burial came down on quite interesting Chalcolithic construction features already. They seem to have found the southern wall of the building formed by Spaces 310 and 454. This southern wall is at the moment visible as dark brick with plaster lines; the features seen abutting wall F.5058 last week, which was then interpreted as a possible buttress (F.3351) would be part of this wall. South of this potential wall there are more bricks and plaster lines which seem confusing at the moment. Today was spent exposing the burial cut, which was actually interesting because it had two square parts that were dug down much deeper than the rest at both end of where the body would have been. Tomorrow we can level and scrape in the area to define walls. Maybe we can close another building this season!
Room fill excavation is not less exciting. XHB and EMM started bringing the eastern part of Building 98 (Spaces 450, 452 and 449) on one level so we could have one level to see how things connect. XHB took down Space 452 (U.16963) to the level that BOD had dug down 450 to in the beginning of the season. EMM attempt to do the same in the southern half of Space 450 (U.16964), but has to deal with plaster feature U.15373, which just will not go away and has to be recognised as a construction by now. U.15373 was first recognised by BOD in the central part of Space 450. PTW yesterday found that it continued further north to buttress F.5052, when removing the fill on top (U.16929). Today EMM found its southern part. So far, I would not feel comfortable to offer any interpretation about what these plaster lumps were put here for. U.15373 seems to consist of several firm and thick lumps of pale yellow plaster and a reddish deposit that might have been put next to each other to form an L-shape. But what for? The installation, if it is one, also gives more the impression of having been built ad-hoc with few care.
JHB and CMB, now digging in Building 105 rather than in Space 342, noticed that the two lenses of fill (U.16958, 16959) they excavated yesterday are part of a larger deposit. This deposit contains the loose fill with many clayish inclusions, sherds, bones and nice small finds (a bone awl yesterday, several pot stands) and also fragments of painted plaster in different sizes, lumps of plasterish and brickish material and today a fragment of plaster-like material with reed impressions. These lumps of building material are part of the deposit rather than constituting a massive layer underneath the loose fill, as interpreted yesterday. JHB scraped the southernmost and westernmost parts of the room fill that had been used for traffic in this season and the previous ones and looked quite homogenous and grey. Now it is clear that the colourful fill spreads over the whole room. It is excavated as U.16966.
DKK finished exposing her ash layer U.16951 today, which does not continue all the way north towards wall F.2428 and has to concentrations in the SW corner of Space 450 and in the northern central part. She then spent some time exposing the faces of the walls in the lower parts of the space, which are in some places covered by plaster and in others not. Slightly disturbing is the fact that the ash seems to run under/into F.2413/5055 in the southern part, but we will sort that out later. At the moment, the space is very delicate because of the plaster. DKK then did a thorough cleaning of the ash layer, we photographed it and it can be drawn tomorrow. The botany specialists came out and recommended sending all the ash to floatation and taking a phytoliths sample. |
