| Entry: | SO and EUR finished taking out the compact uppermost layer of room fill in southern Building 105 (16997) until coming down to softer fill which will be taken out with a new unit number. During the fill removal, EUR uncovered the long expected southern buttress F.3363 of the building. The excitement about this discovery soon was followed by another surprise, when the adjacent southern wall F.3341 was found to feature a gap. The easternmost part of this wall, discovered last year, is only about 70cm long and plastered on all faces. The long western part of the wall, abut by buttress F.3363, also plastered on all sides, ends in line with the eastern face of the buttress. The two southern walls thus seem to form a doorway. This is a most unusual feature on the West Mound so far, but the situation seems to be quite clear. Not only does the plaster verify that we are not dealing with a disturbance, but also the two walls are not in line – they are slightly offset. The doorway would have been blocked when wall F.3345 was constructed. The wall situation thus is really exciting, and EUR and SO started removing the disturbed upper parts of the walls (17257), including the southern part of the western wall F.3352, so we can finally see the outlines of the building clearly. That the mentioned walls are still disturbed on this level indicates that also the room fill 16997 on the same level might contain disturbances that we, however, did not see.
KTX removed nearly the entire remaining wall F.2427 and its corner with F.2408. The aim was to reveal the brickwork in the corner of the two walls to find out whether they are binding into each other or abutting. By the end of the day we knew that they are binding into each other: The uppermost preserved brick layer is set in a way so as to cover the mortar gaps left by the second preserved brick layer. We can assume that the not preserved rest of the walls above also were constructed binding into each other. It was nice seeing this – binding walls make a much more stable building than abutting walls, and apparently this was important to the buildings of Building 105, which sometimes our buildings do not really look like people cared. While removing the walls, KTX took several samples of the grey brick, the reddish brick, the mortar and the plaster material used to plug holes in the wall.
In Building 107, PTW and DLG both are only a few litres of soil away from taking off the two blocks of fill (16990, 16995) that obscured the southern and western buttresses until now. While the outlines of these buttresses seem clear by now, unfortunately the wall uncovered in the process make us face new problems: While under the eastern part of wall F. 2426 we were able to find an older wall F.3304 in 2009, the now exposed western part of this same wall seems to be standing on fill. F.3344 has an extremely irregular base, which is unclear in the northern part as mortar lines are irregular and stop in odd places. However, our aim was to expose the younger walls or wall phases F.5074, F.2425/5050, F.2426 and F.3344 to then remove them – so we do not have to deal with the walls or fills under them yet. This will be a task for once the upper walls are out and we can dig in the lower parts all we want. It seems clear already that the building under B.107, or the older phase of the building, had different outlines from what is found on top.
There are two problems with buttress F.3337, exposed by DLG today. First, it was recognised quite late so its upper part was removed nearly entirely. The westernmost part was left unharmed, and now exposed is sticking up as a high a very narrow little ridge that looks really strange. This is part of the buttress, though, and the only parts of it witnessing the original preserved height. The other problem is that there seem to be several fragments of a plaster layer marking the western edge of the buttress, but these are in no way straight – they form weird shapes that still remain to be interpreted.
I started removing topsoil 17256 on top of the northwest corner of Building 107, so we can expose this corner, remove the walls and thus create a step to secure the high profile we already have in this part of the trench.
In Building 98, GWN removed buttress F.3326 (brick unit 16974) while JHB did small-scale clarification work on buttress F.5057. By the end, we had a profile of F.5057 and a plan view of what was under this buttress. In plan, we saw the plaster floor 16977 running up to a version of the buttress that had similar, but in all directions narrower, outlines as F.5057. The plan of this buttress further showed a core of darker, browner and moister material, surrounded by a coating of greyer and brighter material, to which the floor runs up to. This is best visible on the northern side, less clear on the other two sides (we probably cut out some in the west), but together seems to suggest the following: There first was a buttress made of brown mud. This buttress was then coated with different material, most of which is greyish, to enlarge in by cam 5cm in all directions. At this state, 16977 was laid and runs up to the buttress. Somewhat later, the foot of the buttress was surrounded by fill, but its upper part was still visible, was again coated in mud and plastered over. This last version is what we saw before taking apart the buttress. The phases are not, however, distinguishable in the section yet. Also, we had discussions about whether or not we can see bricks or slabs in section; I definitely see material differences showing as lighter and darker patches, but would attribute this to heterogeneous material or, which would be really good, to indications of rammed earth technique: layers of materials looking slightly different because they were applied one after the other, trampled down, and consist of a slightly different mixture of mud, or dried out differently. We had the section dry out over the day, and will spray it tomorrow, and hopefully see more. Also, once plan and section of F.3326 are nice, we maybe see something similar.
JHB at the end of the day started scraping out the fill from the base of buttress F.5052 opposite of F.5057, to check whether we can find a similar phasing as with F.5057. It would be great to actually see the stump of the oldest version of the buttress.
Since the beginning of this season I have been thinking about terminology. It seems that our Trench 5 contexts are not made to fit into usual archaeological terms. This starts with the simple term brick which I am very reluctant to use when I see the mud slabs in all kinds of shapes, sizes and material which make up B.106, or the massive amount of mud without clear layering in buttress F.5057, F.3326 and presumably the other constructions in B.98 as well.
It continues with the word phase, which can mean so many different things – how much time has to pass between two construction events so that we can call them phases? Standing in B.98, B.107 and B.106, we have been thinking in all different directions about why the buildings look as they look. My favourite hypothesis at the moment is that we are dealing with maintenance work – buildings that had been decaying for a while until somebody decided to remove the upper parts of the walls including the roof and top up these walls with new constructions that are made from building materials different from the older walls. It would be nice if we could verify this by finding a floor, for example between walls F.3312, F.3313 and F.3314 in Space 310, with the surrounding walls rising up only about 1m above the floor level. Even nicer would be the finding of consistent plaster coating of two walls on top of each other. JHB suggested that they might have intended from the start to built walls consisting of two different layers with different materials, for whatever reason. Even if this is not likely, it has to be considered. In this case e.g. walls F.3314 and F.2427 on top of each other would be one wall constructed during several days. Is this one phase, or two?
This leads to the next problematic terms: wall and building. Is a wall one wall with two phases, or two walls, or maybe even three walls, if it is made up from two different kinds of materials constructed at two different events? Building: How many building numbers do I attribute to a building that was built, used, abandoned, chopped, topped up and re-used? One? Two? Three? |
