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Finally I reached the bottom of buttress U. 16858. After few days of removing hugest of buttresses within building 98, the 1516 liters of dirt were transported out of the building. Making such amount to disappear should be a new discipline in the Olympics...at least in Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. However, focus on this construction gave us information of building techniques for both rare and common practices. Considering the specific features, distinct mud brick slabs are unique comparing to other three buttresses in building 98. Other buttress features are quite common for these structures, such as same character of filling consisted of pottery, bones, obsidian, figurines, stones etc. Regarding pottery it is still to be discussed why and how earlier and ‘recent’ shards were mixed within the buttress filling?
Today we reached the bottom level of the buttress which we determined as U. 17273. The character of this filling is somewhat different than the larger top level, as it is consisted of more compact dirt different than the one above. This layer of compact earth can be seen on the west, south and north walls absolutely on the same level (height). This indicates that there were at least two levels of buttress filling. Also the material within this unit (17273) was consisted of larger pottery shards and ground stone. After the top layers and material of this level were removed the outlines of buttress foundation were determined. They are completely same as those of three other buttresses in the building 98. This confirms that all buttresses were almost identically constructed in the first phase, while the western (U. 16858) in its second phase have more apparent mud brick slabs and mortar.
The finding of the day in this buttress was a clay token with engraved organized lines on the both sides. As it is part of filling it can not be associated with any intentional use or evident context, but however it indicates that people in this settlement were using symbolic modes of ritual, economic, social or entertainment engagement. It is still hard to be chronologically defined as there are also earlier artifacts within the buttress filling, thus it can not be determined if the were used in ‘Chalcolihic’ West Mound or were brought by earlier East Mound levels? |
