| Entry: | The removal of buttress U.16858 continued. As we are going down to its bottom more of its construction features becomes clearer. Today after scraping and cleaning of one mud brick/slab layer we determined that they are in larger size and consisted of one brick for a layer i.e. without inserting two or more pieces of bricks. Therefore the discussion still remains if these huge layered pieces of mud should be referred as bricks or slabs. Anyway, due to standardized terms they will be still named as bricks. On the other hand, there were not some new elements within the structure of this buttress. I reached its provisional earlier level represented by a plaster layer, but it is supposed that it can not be from a previous building phase. I started to scrape and clean the top of this plaster level, but as for now it seems that is only a part of frontal plastering of buttress. Tomorrow I continue with its detailed excavation in order to understand if the whole plaster is a layer or it is only applied on the frontal and lateral sides of the buttress.
Besides regular finds within the buttress, I found a broken animal figurine (?) just above the supposed plaster level. The number of figurines in the West Mound is increasing. That is a good sign for a broader figurine data base for further research on the Neolithic and ‘Chalcolitic’ corporeality in Catalhoyuk. |
