| Entry: | The work on buttress U. 16858 continued, but today much slower as we got information from it. Instead of chopping it down I started to scrape its frontal (western) part and absolutely new ‘image’ appeared. Many horizontal lines and different colors emerged thus indicating the usage of mud bricks for buttress construction. Instead of smaller size mud brick, we understood that actually quite often larger blocks of mud bricks were used. The regular width of such mud bricks was approximately 80 cm which was also confirmed by KTX in building 106 and in lower levels of building 107 where DLG works. Therefore we still discuss if we can name such construction features as mud bricks or mud slabs. It is interesting that the width of these mud slabs determined the width of buttress itself, thus suggesting that the space they occupied within the building 98 was already planned and was in possible relationship with the total area provided for the building interior.
After the cleaning of the buttress I started with drawing its frontal size so found some new amazing details associated with its internal features. The complete buttress is consisted of two main levels divided by a long and thick horizontal plaster layer probably as result to different stages (earlier and later) of its construction. The layer bellow the plaster is of little bit different character than the one above so it obviously indicates a various phases of building. Shards of larger size are scattered at the bottom of this earlier level thus indicating different approach towards foundation structuring of the buttress.
In building 107 more figurines are found and one of them is remarkably anthropomorphic representation. It resembles a lot of Late Neolithic and Chalcolithic figurines with hole for inserting the wooden neck and clay head. The concentration of found figurines in the first week of this year campaign announces quite fruitful enrichment of figurines spectrum in the West Mound. |
