| Entry: | Since my last diary entry I have moved onto a new building with Justine and it is going pretty well thus far. It is building 43, and the first order of business, aside from cleaning and recording the building, was to take down a portion of the Northern wall/walls that were eroded and made entry into the building quite dangerous. The inner south facing wall already had the pre existing unit numbers of 12055 for the brick, and 12056 for the mortar. As for the north facing wall we had to asign new unit numbers which were 10535 for the mortar, and 10536 for the brick. There was also a very rich fill area in between the two walls which we assigned the unit number 10537.
These walls were extremely eroded and it was at times difficult to distinguish between the brick and mortar areas. However, the fill in between the two walls was very distinctive, and it also contained many inclusions, bone being the most abundant. We only took down a section of the walls for now due to efficiency and necessity I am assuming. This worked out quite nicely though with regards to entering and exiting the building (as one member of our group has already taken a fall into the building below before we removed the walls) because it is a much safer area now.
Building 43 was also known as Shrine 8 from the Mellaart excavation, and areas of the building are partially excavated. There have been several burials excavated there as well. The building is also known for the west wall that was taken down which had the painting of the two leapords on it. I find building 43 to be extremely interesting, and I believe that the excavation to come will be intriguing and rich with information. For example, while we were recently cleaning the plaster from the floor and platform area in the south east corner of the building, we discovered red paint. This paint appears to be in situ, however, it is in such an eroded state that it may not be able to be saved. We currently have the head of the coservation team working on trying to define the paint fragments a little better before she tells us what we may do, if anything, to preserve them.
We have also found on the surface of the northern end of the building human skull fragments. Scott from human remains took a look and said that we should expect more burials in this building. This should be a good possibility considering that certain areas of the floor in building 43 are more hollow and depressed than other areas. Also, knowing the history of the previous excavations of burials in this building then there is a good chance there are more.
The floor of this building is quite a mess, considering its severe erosion and uneven stratagraphic levels. There are all sorts of layers of plaster and occupation levels that make it difficult at times to distinguish between them all. Therefore, Justine currently has the group working to try to get everything down to one stratagraphic layer. In the meantime we are attempting to establish the relationships between the visible layers of plaster and everything else. Although this is becoming difficult due to the amount of fragmented paint that we are discovering in different areas all over the floor. We assigned unit 10539 to an area around a post retrieval pit that had nice, clean, white plaster chunks visible. It took us a little while to uncover all of it, and we also found a very faint area of red paint as well that we stopped to record. The other unit assigned to all of the other plaster in the area (so far) is 10538. All of the plaster thus far is eroded and very friable.
The plan for tomorrow is to continue recording, see what Ashley has to say about the painted floor area, and continue excavating the building. Just as a side note, I find that I am learning a lot through the excavation of this building thus far with regards to recording, mapping, taking pictures, identifying important characteristics of the area, and general knowledge about excavation. |
