| Entry: | Yesterday our new teammates TET, SO, CMF, GWN and FJ arrived and today they already jumped in right after breakfast cleaning and starting excavation.
EUR and JHB finished exposing walls and floor in Spaces 340 and 341 today. No floor 16977 is present in most of room Sp 340; that is once was present can be inferred from a preserved very undulating fragment in the NW corner and along the walls in the northern part of the room. The fill under the floor is compact homogenous and grey; where the floor is not preserved still it is possible to separate this grey fill nicely from the room fill specked with yellowish and whitish grey inclusions.
In the western part of Space 341, there are patches of clay, but different clay than the one used for the floor, in directly on top of it. We are not yet sure whether these were parts of the fill or maybe small plaster installations that are so badly preserved that you cannot recognise their original function any more; we are waiting to see the entire floor (i.e. for the walls to come out) to understand it.
In the SE corner of Sp. 341, parts of the floor were accidentally removed, but it is preserved next to the wall and buttress.
16977 is actually made up from patches of different materials, but this will be described and documented in detail once the walls on top are out. A patch of floor, made from slightly different material (with more lime) was put on top of 16977 inside Space 452 and runs up to buttress F.3326. This means that the people who built B.98 re-used 16977 in the east, but apparently did not bother cleaning off the fill that had accumulated over its western part, but instead put the walls of their new building on top of this fill, and did not lay a new plaster floor matching the bases of these walls.
The layer of fill on the floor increases considerably from west to east; it is 5-10 under buttresses F.5057 and F.5052 and 60cm under 2413/5055 in Space 341, but not as much under the same wall in Space 340 – thus irregular.
We cleaned the building and recorded it with 3D photography – afterwards it was ready to be removed. JHB and GWN started taking out buttress F.5057 by cutting it back to nearly where it meets wall F.5056 and creating a profile to we could check whether any internal layering enlightening us about the techniques used to construct the buttress could be found. The task was not finished, so we will see tomorrow. They did not go down to the fill under the buttress yet.
KTX cut sections into buttresses F.3301 and F.3302 in Building 106. The profiles showed that the buttresses were not built abutting the walls, but that all features were constructed in one go with brick and mortar lines spreading from the walls into the buttresses. The bricks of B.106 are so large that they cannot be bricks in the strict sense, prepared outside the building, dried, and then brought in to construct a wall. Rather, they were made on the wall from slabs of wet mud spread on a mortar layer. The mortar and brick layers follow the undulating of interface between older and younger walls; this undulating is quite violent in the case of buttress F.3302. Apparently it was not thought to be important to even out this undulating.
PTW and DLG continued wall exposure in Building 107/Space 462 without any new results; a lot of soil has to be moved. PTW is working in the NW corner and DLG in the SW corner.
SO, TET, CMF, EUR and FJ cleaned Building 105 and then scraped the room fill planum (16996) and profile (16971) to be able to distinguish layers to the excavated. |
