| Entry: | Last day with our Southampton power team.
DLG, with Harish and Sam, brushed Building 107 really nicely for a 3D photo session done by PTW. After that, they started taking out wall F.3344 from the top. The reason for starting with this wall is that the section it is part of is so high already, and also that we might find the western wall belonging with F.3304, F.3305 and F.3306 behind the wall under F.3344. They started with the corner of F.3344 with F.2426, and found out the two walls are binding into each other.
KTX and Jack worked out the corner of F.3351 with F.5058, which looked very messy at first, but after a while started to make sense. Here, brick laying was quite irregular, with long, thin, bricks, one small brick put into the very corner, smaller square bricks, and a red brick, flanked by two thin dark grey bricks, in the centre of the corner. They are trying to expose one layer of bricks over the whole corner.
JHB and Emily worked on wall F.2413/5055 in Space 340. Emily took down the corner of this wall with F.2428 to nearly the bottom; JHB is working on the connection point of the wall with the buttress. GWN had an exciting day in Space 341. While working in the lower part of the connection point of F.2413/5055 and F.5056, he found an interface marked by phytoliths, proving that wall F.2413/5055 was built abutting F.5056 in a way that F.5056 was built all the way to wall F.2425/5050. The interface peels quite well in most places, not so well in others. The phytolith layer is the strongest indication. That was the first important find of the day. The second was a bone tool sticking inside F.2413/5055, the gap fill 18363 and a about 0.5cm inside F.2425/5050. I still wonder what unit this tool originally belonged to. Probably either F.2413/5055 or the gap, and then it got dislocated during 8000 years of pressure on this area. The third important find of the day was when GWN came down to the base of the wall and discovered its original outline in plan. Original F.2413/5055 was thinner, and its plastered face connected to the floor, as expected. With ER we discussed why this original feature is not really visible in the section. In section the wall appears as one consistent construction, leaning slightly towards the interior of the building (best visible where JHB works), having a curved face that is thicker in the middle than towards top or bottom. This seems to be the result of several re-coating and re-plastering phases, so there is no break visible in the wall, where suddenly the wall would jump out or so – a smooth transition, as in the buttresses. Original wall F.2413/5055 was quite thin – one wonders why people built thin walls which they then had to support with thick buttresses.
Before GWN determined the relation of F.5056 and F.2413/5055, he had arbitrarily divided their mud brick units not where the actual interface turned out to be, therefore material of F.5056 got mixed into F.2413/5055. We decided to call the unit so far used for brick of F.2413/5055 (16863) a mixed context and to give a new one (18362) to uncontaminated brick of this wall.
PTW finished taking out floor 17294 in Space 345, revealing the very undulating surface of the fill it was laid on.
EUR and CMF took off 10cm in room fill layer 18356 in B.105. After this, the base of the two heaps of brick dump in the two northern corners of the building were still going down into unexcavated, so they started taking off another 10cm with the same unit number. During this work, they might have discovered a new construction feature under/in front of F.5062. At the moment we only see a large bump of dark grey. If it turns out to be a feature, it might be the missing fourth buttress going with F.3365, F.3353 and F.3366. Also, the room fill contains many nice finds, as usual. Something special was an integrated bone-stone tool: the end of one large long bone was found in the fill, on one end obviously cut and smooth, and other end being the ball and showing a deep groove. The bone broke, because it was so fragile, and in it we discovered a small bone tool sticking in the ball end. The artefact apparently was meant to be an axe-like tool, with the bone being the handle and a long stone tool sticking in it, but something did not work out, and the working part of the tool is not left. Really cool.
I worked on cleaning fill from walls in the southern part of B.105. In front of F.2424, on top of F.3303, there is a very compact layer of disintegrated grey brick, mixed in with marl and some other materials like small lumps of burnt brick. The layers does not really seem like collapse, because it contains so many small inclusions, but is certainly more compact than normal room fill, and in parts hard to separate from the disturbed upper part of F.3303. I also cleaned the remains of fill in front of F.3349 and on top of F.3346 in the southwest corner. I now have to do some more work on the many fragments of grey brick showing up further down in this area, which at the moment do not form coherent construction features. |
