| Entry: | In southern Building 105, SO and EUR finished room fill layer 16997 and then cleaned the walls around it. As the layer contained much of the white marl used for plastering, some of the lumps were also quite close to the walls and blur the outlines – we left those parts untouched for now. Buttress F.3363 is nicely visible now; the southwest corner is still unclear. They then cleaned fill from the possible doorway, finding a complete pot stand, quite a unique find. Of course the position makes you wonder about intentional deposition, also the fill in the doorway otherwise is a bit like garden soil, not like the usual mixed room fill.
In the northern part of the Building, FKJ and CMF finished excavating room fill layer 16966. The layer did not only contain many nice finds, but also larger pieces of building materials, painted plaster, many and large lumps of pure white marls, several complete dark grey bricks and lumps of bricks. At the level we are on now, three interesting things showed up in the plan view of the fill: A halfmoon shaped darker patch in front of “platform” F.3353, maybe fill in a cut; parts of a construction feature with dark grey brick and not yet recognisable shape; a long dark brick cut by the section within the room fill. “Bench” F.3311/3346 continues to have very shady limits; it is surrounded by lumps of brick and plaster that cannot clearly be distinguished from the feature. I am looking forward to going deeper and finding more features!
The plaster floor 16977 in Building 98 is seriously harmed by the rain damage; we can only hope that once everything is dried out we will be able to scrape and clean it into a nice shape again.
JHB scraped around the bottom part of F.5052, and probably exposed the faces of the older phase of the buttress, in its smaller version. Most of it is plastered and therefore well visible, but some parts lack plaster and then he scraped until the material looked brickish. In the western part, older and younger buttress seem to have had very similar outlines. A 3D photo-model was taken. The unclearest part was the southeast corner of the feature, so next he will take down this corner, creating a section through the centre of the feature. As we cannot distinguish the phases in the upper part of the buttress, everything will be treated as one unit, material samples will be taken from the centre of the unit.
GWN started cleaning the section through F.5053/5054, created by scraping 3-4cm of plaster and dried brick from its eastern face. After wettening the material, mortar and bricks lines showed up very nicely, thus confirming that this is the only buttress in B.98 actually built with bricks. This was documented in photo and drawing. As we want to document the brick laying while removing the feature from the top, GWN then started enlarging his quarter-slice to cut back the buttress into a section ca.8cm into the building from where it meets the wall.
In 107, DLG finished cleaning the section finding two more figurines. PTW started drawing it from the north. DLG started taking out the step in the room fill that we left in the northern part last year (17262). As usual, the room fill in this building is traumatising. It contains so much disintegrated mud brick debris and so little finds that one constantly feels like hacking into a wall. Then a larger lump of plaster or a sherd appears to verify it is not a wall. Then you keep hacking and again think this might be a wall…. Then you find a large bone: it is not a wall. And so on and so on.
KTX spent some more time with the interface of F.2427 and F.5068. There really seems to be no gap between them; we then tried to carefully remove the remains of F.2427 where it meets F.5068. This interface could tell us a lot about the relative chronology of the walls, and the buildings going along with them. Were it perfectly straight, we would suspect either that one of the walls was cut for the other one to be built, or that they were constructed at the same time with a lot of care taken to not mix materials. Were it wobbly, we would suspect that either one of the walls was built earlier, and already had eroded a bit on its outer, exposed side, or that they were built at the same time and that materials melted into each other during the construction. As crucial as this point is, as hard is it to decide. Wall F.2427 is preserved only up to 5cm high here, then we have the usual rodent holes, and also some rain damage. We left the damages areas for when they are dried out. At the moment it looks like the interface was quite straight.
KTX then removed most of wall F.2408, exposing the top of the lowermost brick layer which allowed several interesting observations. F.2408 and F.2427 were constructed of two rows of bricks next to each other. We were able to see several large bricks in plan. They are probably too large (length 80-85cm) to have been manufactured elsewhere and then carried to the construction site; in wet stayed they would have weighed a lot. Thus, they were probably made on the wall, which is further confirmed by smaller bricks with funny sizes as found in wall F.2427, which were apparently made to fill in gaps between the large bricks. The sliding of the wall produced these gaps; the bases of F.2427 and F.2408 are irregular, and the brick layers followed these irregularities without any effort to smoothen them. When bricks were made on the wall, I find it surprising that they still bothered to make bricks at all; they could just have made one continuous layer of mud, then one layer of mortar, and so on and so on. That they still made bricks was probably either for stability or some non-functional purpose. The two corners investigated to far (F.2408-F.2427 and F.2408-F.5058) had what we call “plugging plaster” in them to create nice rounded corners. |
