| Entry: | Excavation work commenced with the removal of the room-fill within Sp.341. This is the only remaining room of Building 98 that is filled. The upper surface of U.16972 was recognised last season but not excavated. The immediate intention behind the removal of this room-fill is to allow and ease the destruction of the entire building complex with its walls and buttresses. Furthermore, the activities and processes concerning the filling of this space will be studied.
The general idea is that the upper, more thick package of room-fill is the result of a more gradual process rather than the second more compact and shallow package of material immediately above the floor of the building, which is the result of direct ‘living-activities’ in conjunction with the room spaces. This notion is based upon the impressions and ideas gained while excavating the other rooms of the building during the previous seasons.
An area of several plaster-layers including red painted plaster in one corner of the upper part of U.16972 was difficult to understand. How were 4 or 5 ‘sheets’ of plaster roughly 20x30cm in size thrown or cast into the building in such a manner that the red paint was visible on the top? Or were these slabs placed there in this spot with a particular intention? This second idea seems strange in the context of a gradual room-filling process. Possibly, if people were directly responsible for the filling of this area they had the luxury of discarding this seemingly quality material, e.g. red-painted plaster suggesting that a high standard of construction existed. If the depth of the upper package of soil is related to the time duration in which the filling took place, and under the assumption that this process was gradual, then quite a large timeframe, possibly several decades, can be expected. |
