| Entry: | So, those 4 last days were my first at the southern part of the space 342: new layers, new approach, new "roommate" (EUR). This part of the building 105 was still very unclear; the lines of the walls were not always well defined and the relations between them was not totally understood.
My first work was to clean the upper face of the inner buttress (F. 3366) to make the structure appear. It was covered by an heterogenous layer (U. 17283) made of plaster lumps, loose ashy patches and crumbly room fill and mortar. All of them were new for me so I excavated slowly to be sure I understood what I did.
The upper face was divided in two parts:
The eastern part we saw an accumulation of mud bricks, mortar layer, mud bricks, mortar, etc, in a vertical position. Such a simple structure, easy to see, easy to understand. BUT (because in that corner it's NEVER easy to understand), it doesn't seem to continue deeper. It could just be a part of a wall which collapsed.
The western part of the upper face showed to be made of lines of mud bricks in an horizontal position. They are part of the internal structure of the buttress. JMR had said that normaly the upper face should be irregular but this part is surprisingly flat.
This work is not yet finished, so we will see how we can link those two parts and the outer buttress during the next few days.
Then I started to excavate the bottom of the buttress, in the southwestern space of the building (U. 17289). In top view, we saw a lot of mud bricks alignment, plaster lines in different direction, so it had to become clearer. I tried to go deeper, but it was complicated by the fact that the layer of room fill (U. 17289) was very (very very) hetergenous, from soooo compact to sooooo loose, with a list of different colors worthy of an order book of paintings. Furthermore, my work was complicated by the fact that the place was really small, so I couldn't have the detachment I needed to have a good view on what I did. I can notice that a lot of finds of the layer came from the southern part of the space.
I also found the southern wall of the space (F. 3364), from the plaster line we see in top view. Sometime pieces of plaster seem to be conserved on it. At the bottom we just have the mud bricks alignment, easy to see. The link with the outer buttress is not yet understandable, we need more time to follow the wall. It will be done on the next few days.
My last work was to remove the room fill in front of the western wall of the building to make the plaster appear. It was not always well preserved and the recognition from the compact and homogeous room fill was sometime not so easy. I tried to not "sculpt the plaster" like Sonia says. So, no Sonia, I will not sculpt an East-Mound like plaster leopard in memories of your departure, sorry. I cut the bench which had been left against the western wall. The section showed different layers of room fill, so it was definitly not a construction, just a big piece of compact room fill, packed down because we always came down to the building by that way. We could see Three different type of layer :
At the top a white layer of room fill made of compact plaster (too heterogenous to be a construction), on the middle a layer made of white compact crumbly material, and at the bottom the same brown-red room fill we have in the whole building. This last layer contained a lot of finds and X-finds, especially big pottery sherds.
Behind, the western wall continues, but the numerous animal burrows made the surface very irregular. The plaster is less and less clear more we go to the south. The conection with F. 3364 is not yet known. |
