| Entry: | KTX worked further on clarifying the brick work in the area wall F.5058 meets buttress F.3301. This area, as already expected, is quite complicated. The wall makes a slight bend here, and also was connected to the buttress, so we expected brick laying to be irregular. We will see how it turns out. KTX in the process of removing tried to take out one large brick in total, but it broke. This brick (17291) and the mortar layer under it (17292) were taken to flotation completely as an example what material is present in one brick /mortar layer alone. ER also took a soil block sample from F.5058; we chose a spot where both the grey and the red type of brick, and mortar, were inside the block.
CMF spent time on wall clarification in the SW corner of B.105. She was able to expose the northern face of wall F.3364, which seems to be sitting directly on the older wall F.3368. The connection of F.3364 with the buttress F.3363 is not very well visible; there is either a gap here, or some building material that we have not identified yet, a rather yellowish homogenous brick. CMF then went on to expose more walls in the totally messy very southwest corner, where we see many patches of walls with yellowish brick and plaster which at the moment make so little sense that they do not have feature numbers yet. While these wall fragments could, based on their orientation, go together with walls F.3364 and F.3346, but it seems strange that they are made out of a different building material; and also, we did not find any physical connection between the grey and the yellow walls yet.
EUR finished excavating room fill 17288 between buttresses F.3366 and F.3353 down to the level of the northern part of the building. After the fill had been quite homogenous in the last day, today he came down to a very mixed layer of fill again, the usual very heterogeneous room fill we are used to. Parts of this were two large chunks of white plaster in secondary position.
DLG, later assisted by PTW and CMF who were happy to take a break from fine-scale work, continued taking out the thick room fill layer 16988 in Building 107, finding many nice artefacts, and also the faces of wall F.3305 and buttress F.3308, which show clear layers of brick and mortar.
JFB took out the floor in Space 345 and in the process made very important observations on the floor and wall stratigraphy. She found that 17277 is a limited whitish floor in the centre of the room, lying on the green-grey floor 17294 which spans the entire room and runs up the plaster of the surrounding walls in several places. 17277 might have been larger originally, and might have been destroyed at the edges of the room, or it might only have been this small, maybe covering worn out 17294 in the central room. 17294 is a quite thick layer of the greenish clay; its thickness varies and in some parts we had the impression of seeing two layers, but this was never so obvious.
GWN and JHB continued clarifying phasing of wall F.2413/5055. By now it is quite clear that the wall had very different biographies in the two spaces. In Space 341, we now recognised four layers of wall plastering, and this seems to be plastering on what we perceived to be the second, younger, phase of the wall. He took off the thick outermost plaster layer, after which the wall was thinner and he removed fill 17290 which had before been under the part of the wall that was removed. Now, three more layers of plaster are visible, and there still is fill “under” the wall – probably this is and indication that we still have some phases to discover. GWN also followed the floor 16977 towards the wall after taking out fill 17290. Next, he will try to follow the phasing around the corner to wall F.5056, while leaving the eastern half of the wall untouched as a reference point.
JHB has more trouble in Space 340. He removed some material from the lower parts of the walls which was too homogenous and compact to be room fill, but not homogenous enough to be wall material in situ. Behind this, plaster on the wall face showed up, belonging to an older phase of the wall. In this space, we might only have two plastering/recoating phases. |
