| Entry: | Another exciting day in Trench 5. A not so nice new thing was rain damage due to the thunderstorm last night. I happens that the most leaking parts of the tent are over B.98. This one time we have a nice white plaster floor, and now we have little rain ponds in it! In the afternoon it rained again, and this time the damage was even worse. I hope it will dry a bit over night.
In Building 98, GWN finished cutting the section and plan view of buttress F.3326 that seems to show similar characteristics to those observed in F.5057, but less clear. We left it to dry before deciding how to go down to the floor level. The drying out might now take a while – stupid rain. We also watered the dried outer parts of both cut buttresses F.5057 and F.3326 during the day in an attempt to create even moisture content throughout the feature.
GNW then moved over to buttress F.5053/5054, which is a really imposing feature, large and about as high as I am. He started to cut out one quarter (SE), and first went 35-40cm deep and made a planum in the quarter. Surprisingly, we clearly saw a mud brick on this level. After distinguishing the mud brick, we also became aware of a mortar line so far hidden by patches of wall plaster. GNW then scraped plaster and dried brick material off the eastern face of the buttress. Again surprisingly, we saw a nice thick plaster line under the buttress, separating it from the fill underneath. In section, the buttress is framed by white plaster, which is only missing at the top. In total, this feature was built using very different techniques from the other three – with more investment into forming bricks and preparing the construction site. We started joking about “a man had four sons, and each of them built a buttress …”, but maybe it was like that. Maybe this is not phasing, but just different people with their own techniques involved in the construction process.
JHB cut a quarter (SW) out of buttress F.5052 all the way down to where the floor appears “under” it. The situation seems similar to F.5057, but here only two phases are visible so far: a smaller buttress that floor 16977 runs up to and which had a very rounded SW corner, and a thick reworked phase of the buttress made when its foot was already surrounded by fill. In the section we thought we saw bricks or lines. We’ll look again tomorrow with more time.
FKJ and CMF started excavating room fill (16966) in the northern part of B.105, where it is already excavated quite deep. The room fill is the usual mixture of many different materials and artefacts, but contains especially many fragments of white plaster (marl), and at least two whole grey bricks that seem to be refuse, not collapse, as they are complete and in isolated positions. In the southern part of B.105, SO and EUR finished scraping back (17257) to find walls. The southwest corner of the building challenges us. No dark grey brick walls could be found here, instead a wall made of yellowish brown brick with a thick plaster line. This wall is clearly recognisable, but its outlines less clear. Right now there are three hypotheses about this: 1. The southwest corner of the building for some reason was for some reason built out of different material – does not convince me that much as the walls seem to have slightly different orientation than the grey walls. 2. We are dealing with another phase of the walls, as in B.106 and B.107 – therefore different material and slightly different outline. 3. The southwest corner of the building was cut and new walls put here, belonging to a different structure. Also less probable right now as the fill seems to be consistent all over the interior space surrounded by walls.
At this point we decided we would not understand the walls by cutting them down some more. We already are more than one meter down from topsoil, as there were so many late disturbances here. Normally, the tops of walls can be found 20-50cm below topsoil. SO and EUR therefore started to take out fill from inside the walls (17258) to approach them from the sides. 17258 is a thick layer of fill, as we still cannot see clear changes or lenses.
KTX removed the remainder of F.2427 today. He noticed that in some parts, the preparation plaster layer 16999 under the wall had an additional layer of mortar on top, under the lowermost brick layer; the function is not clear because the patches of mortar were not used to even out the surface. Towards the end of the day, he tried to remove the last pieces of the wall towards the parallel wall F.5068 and the gap between the two walls. We noticed that the gap might actually not exist, but rather a narrow crack in between the walls, widened in places by rodent holes which, as usual, destroy crucial interfaces. KTX scraped the walls from the top, and in most places the two walls seem to directly touch each other. We’ll continue this task tomorrow.
DLG and PTW finished exposing buttresses F.3356 and F.3337. We then spent some time with the western section/wall face in the Building (B.107), which becomes more and more interesting every day. The section has a hole in the middle where burial F.3342 was, nearly exactly above buttress F.3356. Directly north of it, wall F.3344 goes down from the top to the bottom, thus about 2m high and still continuing down into unexcavated area. The base of F.3344 slopes heavily upwards, though, and in the corner with F.5074 it sits on very homogenous material that seems to be an older wall continuing under F.5074. The stump of this older wall is very irregular. The central part of F.3344 was removed by the burial. In the south, F.3344 has a very irregular base showing an edge, sitting on very homogenous material that is interpreted by us as either fill put here in preparation of the construction of the wall, or a mud brick construction. DLG thinks the material is not stable enough for a wall, but this never seems to have been an issue for the builders of any of our buildings. Under this homogeneous material, there is the usual mixed fill with sherds. Wall F.3344 also is leaning into the room in its centre, it is curved. While the heavily uneven bases certainly were created by the Chalcolithic builders, the leaning probably was not intended, and a result of the poor foundation material.
The section will be drawn tomorrow, and the building 3D documented, and we discussed what to do then. Version no.1: keep the section while removing the rest of Building 107 and going down further, because it is a really interesting section that will keep telling us much about phasing. Version No.2: Remove F.3344 from the top of the section to find out what the hell as this stuff under it is and whether we can find an older wall when scraping back fill towards west. Version No.3: Remove the wall, but keep a slice of its westernmost part, so we can both investigate what is under it and keep it in the section. This might be unstable, though. |
