| Entry: | Today I continued in the same area as yesterday, but with a vastly different approach. Instead of trying to define mudbricks that appeared essentially indefinable, I decided to instead create a section starting from the edge of the last recognizable place (the buttress visible in the section) and to cleanly, and methodically take it back until I either hit wall 3344 or 3348 The hope behind this was that I might reach the continuation of the wall, but when I reached the edge, not only did it appear that the mudbrick that was strewn around was basically formless, but also that the virtually sterile fill that was visible under wall 3344 still continued down. Even the bit of wall 3348 that had seemed the most like a wall continuing north from wall 2526 turned out to be nothing more than more of this fill. This turned out to be something of a disappointment as we had hoped that this wall would be the closing wall of 343, but even this sort of negative result can be a positive. We now know that on the western side of 343, the earlier and later walls are not connected in the same way as they are in the south or the east. We also know that just assuming that the wall is under the other is not effective and that we have to re-imagine the house structure and phasing to understand the connection between the upper room and the lower.
The phenomenon of this sterile fill is incredibly interesting to me. Compared to the other roomfills I’ve encountered, it appears to have been sifted before it was used. It seems to me that this would be an ineffective type of fill to use as the foundation of a wall as it seems to be rather loose and would poorly support the weight of the walls. However, that seems to be exactly the case. The fill appears to begin within 5cm of the imaginary vertical of the wall above it. Before that 5cm mark, the fill consists almost entirely of mudbrick and mortar and there are more and larger pieces of bone and pottery. The sterile fill, by comparison, would include maybe 5 small chips of pottery and bone per 48 liters of dirt—an astronomically low number. It seems, then, that this fill was intentionally crated as a platform for the wall above it. The benefit of such a fill is that it would be easy to create a level surface upon which to build a wall, but as I’ve mentioned, it seems that the softness of such a fill would not long support walls atop it. The possibility of the builders merely not being sharp enough to figure out that a wall built on soft ground would be ineffective is unsatisfying. Also, the eastern and southern walls of the same building are built directly on top of the previous phase’s walls, providing strong, stable supports for the new walls. Perhaps the original western wall of 343 had collapsed, or else they new phase mirrored the old phase in only the other three walls while the eastern wall was built either closer or further away. If the latter is the case, we are not likely to actually find the early eastern wall anytime soon, as it would have been removed if it were closer than the new wall, and outside our current excavation area if it was further away. Either way, this question of the sterile fill is a puzzling one and we will have to excavate further to better inform the answers. |
