| Entry: | Today we had a lot of visitors, which accompanied us on a long trench tour and discussion after breakfast, so that actually not that much excavation work was done. The discussions were very interesting, though, towards the end we talked about how to conserve and present our trench and the site in general.
Also, Angeliki came out to introduce us to her videoing project; she supplied JHB, CMF and me with the little cameras that are worn on the ear and record what we see and hear. The cameras felt surprisingly natural after only a short while, and everybody behaved quite naturally. I am afraid the people looking at this later will see a lot of not so interesting trowel scratching and hear a lot of inappropriate jokes, but this is the reality of archaeological fieldwork.
JFB is working with us in the trench for a few days and picked up FKJs work in Space 345, removing the remaining sherds 17287 lying on the surface 17277 and then tackling the connection of the surface with the walls. The situation is confusing, as usual. Also as usual, most of the connecting parts has been eaten by rodents. In a few places the plastered surface seems to connect to the walls, but in irregular places. In a few places it seems like the floor was running under the wall, in others it runs “under” the wall but seems to connect to it back there, indicating a similar phasing as in B.98, where the original walls were thinner, later their upper parts were coated excluding the lowermost parts, to give the impression of walls sitting on fill.
DLG is back to the trench and continued his thick room fill layer 16988 in B.107, finding several nice artefacts, including a miniature-vessel. At the bottom level of 16988, the wall elevations in the so far excavated SE corner are really interesting. It seems that walls F.2426 and F.2425/5050 are sitting on walls F.3304 and F.3305, which are sitting on a ca. 2-3cm thick, very regular and horizontal layer of crumbly material whose outlines are blurred by animals, which again is sitting on what seems to be another wall. PTW sees fill in between F.2426 and F.3304, so be might be dealing with five instead of four different levels. Anyway, four would already be interesting enough. We will hopefully see this phasing in the entire room after removing 16988, and then record it and start removing it from the top. The eastern wall of B.107 has actually become a crucial spot now, as it is so high that when we remove F.2413/5055 of B.98 next to it, we have to remove F.2425/5050 too. We want to remove F.2413/5055 first, then take a look and a photo on the wall stacking in B.107 from the east, and then start taking down that wall too, best on the same day, to avoid health an safety issues. I am constantly yelling at people already for walking on thin crumbly walls, but still many people like to take shortcuts. I really do not want to see a wall collapse under one of my colleagues, as I like both them and the walls.
CMF and EUR continued room fill excavation (17289 and 17288) and parallel wall clarification, which is moving especially slow in the SW corner of the building, but we are getting there – eventually.
KTX continued taking down southern F.5058, which is a lot of soil to move.
JHB and GWN tackled wall F.2413/5055 in B.98. The whole thing got a bit messy, as the wall continued to surprise us. First we started out wanting to scrape off the plaster to see the mud brick structure behind. In theory, after this we should have had a view of the walls that is a mixture of a wall elevation and the section of the fill under it/the fill in front of the lower, earlier, thinner version of the walls. When coming down to the bottom of the walls, though, unexpected thing happened. GWN in Space 341 found the earlier phase of the wall, which is clearly visible because when he scraped off the upper plaster, and some fill, another layer of plaster appeared. We are still working on the lowermost part of the walls now, which looks all messy. In Space 340, JHB seemed to find plaster on the lower parts of the walls, too, after scraping off fill that was only some centimetres thick. At this point, I got a bit of a bad feeling. In Space 340, the two phases seem to be clear, and the lowermost part of the wall will certainly be clarified, too. I think we might have found a way, though, to document a state with both wall phases visible in one picture. We have many photos of the late wall phase, of course, and will have many of the older phase, and can overlap them in 2D and 3D and will eventually find out where they coated the walls with how much new brick; it would have been much more convincing to people who were not in the trench during the wall removal, and also to us when we start to question our finding later ourselves, had there been a photo with both plastering phases. Now people might think we just did not scrape back the wall enough, as actually the wall looks more convincing as it is now – it is straight now, the later coating made its face irregular.
Even more complicated in Space 340, where JHB found the plaster in the lower part of the wall at nearly the same place at the plaster above, which is now however gone. Did we not scrape back the walls enough here? It is hard to remember where exactly the original wall face was. Also here, we will be able to reconstruct that with the photos, I just wish I would have been able to see this with my own eyes.
Basically, I am convinced we will work out the phasing, which seems to be in general what we expected, but I am upset with myself for not having thought about how to document the process of getting there. We could just have left half of the wall in every space intact, and only scraped back the other half. We could have sectioned it in a small area. Removing the buildings in an organised way has helped us so much in understanding the phasing. Once we understand the phasing, though, obviously everything is gone. At that point, the only documentation we can do is verbal description. So far, I have tried to organise the removal process in away that we also have photo and drawing evidence of everything, but in this case this did not work out. Well, we will have to deal with this situation. |
