| Entry: | I forgot to mention something earlier: After talking to Lisa G about this, we decided to, from last Thursday 19th July on, in layers with many clay balls not treat the balls as x-finds any more, but collect them in a bag like pot sherds etc. The reason for this is that if many clay balls are present they can be seen as normal components of the layer rather than very special finds.
JHB continued working on cluster 16981, finding more nice stuff such as large mandibles, a fragment of multi-layered red wall plaster and phytoliths.
EUR started layer 16980 in Space 341, which turned out to contain many finds, as the lowermost ca. 0.5m of fill in the other rooms of B.98 did. Somewhat special ingredients are a high amount of ash, fragments of a large (cooking?) pot and large sherds of painted unfired pottery. He is uncovering the uppermost finds, and we document the process with several working shots. There are also many lumps of different kinds of clay.
PTW and KTX will remove buildings B.107 and B.106, respectively; they started by taking out the remaining sand bags and brushing them. B.107 is ready to go, but uncovering B.106 made us again aware of some unsolved issues concerning its southern half. First, pit F.3331 has obscured walls of Space 461 underneath Space 454; this however might become clearer once B.106 on top is taken out. Also, the plastered surface 16932 runs up to wall F.5058 / 3358 in a way that forms a bench-like feature and is not yet understood. Last but not least, wall F.2427 is cut by several small pits and wall F.3351 by burial F.3343. We have to deal with these questions and disturbances before taking out the building.
I spent the day scraping around the walls in B.98. The floor necessitates reconsidering all outlines we identified earlier. The facades of the walls were always hard to find, because plaster is often lacking and the wall material is not all that difficult from room fill. It seems we took the building for messier than it really is; often scraping around the bases of the walls and following the floor actually produces a nice layer of plaster that was still covered by room fill, e.g. the northern face of buttress F.5057 and the eastern face of wall F.2413/5055 in Space 340. We seem to have thought the walls were becoming wider at the bottom; instead they stay even or are becoming narrower (F.2413/5055). These new discoveries show that the finds we saw “sticking in the walls” last year actually are fill; in some cases, however, it still looks like the walls were sitting on fill, possibly on fill on top of the plaster floor 16977: F.3333, 3324, 3326, 5057 eastern face, 5052 and 3320. We’ll see. |
