| Entry: | After sweeping the whole building b.105 for the photos and the 3D scan (our beautiful baby shines now!), I started to take f.3349 away. This wall is situated in the southwestern corner of b.105, where 3 walls with more or less the same orientation have been cut by a fourth one. The last one (f.3349) is the upper and the youngest one. Taking it away will permit us to understand the outlines and the relations between the three older walls, which are linked with b.105, in particular in the very unclear southwestern corner of the room.
The wall follows along almost all of the western side of b.105 from the north to the south, where it has a corner and turns to the east. The northern part of the wall is cut by a pit then disappears in the section of the trench, and we lose the eastern part after few centimeters after the corner. We hope that the excavation of the wall will make its outlines clearer.
So, f.3349 is built above the two walls f.3352 and f.3350, and we would like to expose it from the top. I started by the northern part of the wall, normally the easier because the three walls can be seen in the northern section of the pit. However this section is really dry now, so it has become crumbly, and the colors have become all the same. Furthermore all this part is totally disturbed by a huge mip-mip castle/labyrinth, so the mud bricks and mortar lines are really unclear. For a long time my wall and I played hide-and-seek together (it’s really gifted at that game!), but I finally won after following it though the western section of the trench, the only place where I could see the mortar lines without so many animal disturbances.
I noticed quite a lot of finds, sometimes quite big for a wall but they could have been brought by the mip-mip.
My biggest difficulty was to find the bottom of f.3349, leaning on two different other walls. F.3352 was built with black mud bricks and white mortar, so it is quite easy to see, but f.3350 has a brown-orange yellow color and is relatively clear, but we don’t see the bricks lines and it’s really disturbed by the animal burrows. So I didn’t see the change of material immediately and I excavated a little too much. The difference is easy to see in the section, where we see that f.3349 is linked to the wall below though a mortar layer.
I went bit by bit to the south, where the wall becomes clearer. Now I know my environment well, so tomorrow will be a more effective day. |
