| Entry: | Today I continued taking out the wall F 3335 (as unit 17268) and the buttress F 5052 (as unit 16856). The interaction between F 3335, F 2428, F 2429, F 3320, and F 5052 (four walls and a buttress) is complicated indeed. Here is the sequence of excavation up to now. First, I took the buttress F 5052 back to just before the interface with wall F 3335 and all the way down to just before the floor. Inside the butress, we found a similar situation as the other buttresses of building 98, with an inner ring of plaster representing an older, smaller buttress from an earlier phase of construction. I then took out the wall F 333, to the east of buttress 5052. There was a well defined interface between wall F 3335 and wall F 3320 from the eastern corner to the buttress F 5052. A curious patch of plaster lie directly between the two walls, which is unusual. This means that one of the walls was plastered before the other was erected. The plaster was more adhered to wall F 3335 and easily separated from wall F 3320, which I take to mean that it was originally part of F 3335, the exterior of that wall (north face). In addition, wall F 3335 leaned out towards the bottom, while F 3320 leaned in. I take this, in combination with the plaster, to mean that F 3335 came before F 3320. However PB disagrees and thinks that 3320 was orignially an inside wall for B 98. I interpret this to mean that the north face of 3335 was plastered, and may have been a plastered exterior wall to B 98, which is odd since we have found no exterior walls that have been plastered. However, this patch of plaster may have been preserved because of the abuttment of wall F 3320. Alternatively, wall F 3320 could have come first (still unclear at this point), in which case the southern face of F 3320 (as well as the plastered eastern face) would have been the inside 180 degree angle of a northern extension of B 98.
After this, I removed a horizontal layer spanning all 5 of these features, because the features had been exposed and walked over for years, making the exposed surface quite difficult to read. The entire area was taken down about 10 cm, revealing a couple of mortar and brick lines, but mostly criss crossed with rodent burrows, which inconveniently enjoy eating right through the interfacies between features. |
