| Entry: | Those last two days I worked on the northwestern corner of B. 105, excavating the strange mud brick feature discovered in three of the corners of the room. Discovered during the excavation of u.17280, it seemed to be a big heap of mud material (u. 18364), without real shape but with the same dark grey color, the same clayey texture and the same inclusions of little bits of charcoals as we find in the mud bricks. We were waiting to find the bottom of this “structure” before excavating it.
During the digging of u. 18356 we finally saw that it leaned on the room fill. So we started to take it away. The mud brick material was mixed with crumbly mortar lumps that we considered as the same remains of collapsed material. I thought that I finally would take the entire heap away, but from the beginning a new layer of plaster appeared under the mud bricks. I started to remove all the clayey material to see the shape of the new layer (u. 18366). It was made of different lumps of collapsed plaster, and between them a dark sediment filling the chinks. The western part contained lots of small white lumps, closed to each other, whereas the eastern part had only two big pieces of red colored plaster. Those two lumps had strange shapes (corner and cylindrical shape), and were made of a plaster with a lot of inclusions of small stone and chaff prints. I really enjoy this work, because those lumps belonged to nothing I knew, and their shape was always a surprise.
The only other finds of those two units were small worn sherds and bones, which support the idea of collapsed material.
After removing and sampling those two lumps, I took the layer away. It leaned on a loose and dark sediment, with some mud bricks and plaster lumps (sometimes with the same texture, colors and inclusions as the two big painted pieces). We might have thought about a construction, a new feature, but the material was linked with a loose room fill, containing big finds (pottery sherds, bones), so very different from what found in the upper layers. This room fill layer was associated with 18356 we excavated with EUR all around, even if there were more mud bricks in this corner. |
