| Entry: | Starting Excavation in West Mound Trench 5 this season. We arrived Friday 13th July and have been cleaning the trench from sand bags and soil until yesterday, when we started excavating after breakfast.
Aim of this season is to remove those buildings whose walls have been defined and analysed and whose internal fill has been completely removed, i.e. Building 98 and possibly Buildings 106 and 107. Some questions remain about the latter two, so we’ll look at them again first.
We started in Building 98. In the end of last season we were very confident to have reached an undercut bases of its walls without having found a floor. We interpreted the building, or the part of the building we excavated (lower floor of a two-storied building??), to not have had a constructed floor, but a trampled surface, which we were able to find in Space 449, but not in the other rooms. The fill we cut into in the last days of the 2011 season we interpreted to be fill under the building, possibly a large midden area. Unlike Buildings 106 and 107, B.98 did not seem to be sitting directly on the remains of a lower building.
Fill still remains in one of the rooms of B.98, in Space 341. KTX and EUR started excavating this fill. In the small section of this fill visible between buttresses F.5053/5054 and F.5057, we recognised two major packages in this fill: a thick package of darker and less compact fill on top (U.16972), and a thinner packages of compact fill of generally brighter colour underneath (U.16973). The interface between those two packages is slightly curved and was interpreted to correlate with the bases of F.3334, F.3335 and F.3328. These constructions are interpreted to belong to a phase of re-use of B.98: The building was constructed, used, abandoned, filled (U.16973 is part of this first infilling episode), then re-used including the construction of internal benches, and then filled again (this includes U.16972).
It was therefore important to us to be able to separate the two units during excavation, as they belong to two phases of use separated by several years, possibly. U.16972 is now nearly completely removed and represents “normal” very heterogeneous room fill. Special features are many fragments of red painted plaster, of which several large bits clustered on the western edge of the rooms, and a cluster of pot sherds, including a nearly complete and burnt pot, where Space 341 meets Space 452.
Towards the end of the day EUR and KTX tried to both expose walls and find the interface between U.16972 and U.16973 in Space 341. Both tasks turned out to be difficult. The walls around Space 341 only have patches of plaster left on them and do not have straight faces. We were able to locate a few spots where the fill peels from the wall due to a layer of phytoliths between them, and are going to continue this. The interface of both fill units could not be clearly defined by colour, inclusions or anything else. We therefore decided to keep going down until we are sure to have reached to lower fill. This will probably mix some finds from the lower fill into U.16972, but leave U.16973 uncontaminated. During the last minutes of excavation we found three clay balls, indicating that we are getting close to the lower fill which generally contained more finds than the second infilling episode.
PTW, JHB and I started tackling buttress F.3326 yesterday, which was supposed to be removed first and serve as test allowing us to try different strategies. We first scraped off the plaster U.16975, which was only preserved in some parts, and then scraped 1-2cm of the mud 16974. The freshly scraped “mud brick” again did not look like walls material. First, no wall in B.98 has bricks or mortar. Second, they contain larger amounts of finds, and finds of large sizes than you would expect in walls. The only thing that makes us 100% sure that we are dealing with walls and not room fill was the plaster on the features. Our first interpretation on seeing the buttress material was that people did not actually mix this and constructed a building of it, but that they cut walls out of a thick compact layer of fill, which they then plastered over.
As the buttress material was already quite dried out, we decided to cut it back another 15cm from all three sides to get a view and photo of the fresh material to verify the impression that walls might have been cut out of fill rather than constructed. This interpretation is further supported by the many large sherds and bones found in the building material.
During scraping around the buttress upon the attempt to remove it, something whitish showed up in the fill in/under Sp 449 – the fill that was supposed to be stratigraphically under the building. This whitish thing turned out to the a nice and well preserved plaster floor (U.16977) that so far was exposed in nearly the whole room and might spread further into the other rooms of B.98. This floor is a pleasant surprise, but obviously indicates that we have not yet reached fill under the building, but missed the floor last year by about 2cm. The lower parts of the walls, which were interpreted to not be walls because they were not covered in plaster and had large stones and sherds sticking in them, are in fact walls. The floor in some parts seems to have been smeared up against the wall, but the lowermost 5-7cm of walls also might not have been plastered in B.98. While we did not reach the base of Sp. 449 last year, in the western part of the building we might have – the ash layer that was both found inside Space 340 and under wall 2413/5055 is a strong indication.
We are following floor U.16977 towards the building centre. The fill above floor 16976 did not show any special features so far except for a few pot sherds lying directly on the floor. |
