| Entry: | CMF and EUR brushed their Building 105 for its first 3D-Scan. After this, CMF started on removing wall F.3349, which turned out to be quite disturbed, and uncovered nicely the tops of walls F.3352 and F.3350, starting from the northern part moving south. EUR excavated further in sondage 18370 and noticed that there is much more collapse around the wall piece 18372. This might turn out to be our first primary collapse context, so I am really excited. Cleaning the collapse with take forever, though, so this is probably the end of B.105 excavations this year – but a really nice end. Also, the surrounding buttresses F.3365 and F.3366 seem to form strange shapes – they appeared to be sitting on fill; when I scraped into this fill quite far, we found the brick behind it, but so far the faces of the buttresses have been so straight that this curving in seems odd.
KTX also brushed his Building 106 for a 3D-Scan. After that, he opened a sondage to expose the plaster layer 16999 in the western part of the building. For this, he removed the remaining two brick layers of F.3301 and of F.5058 behind the buttress. The aim is to connect this layer with the many plaster layers (16932) found in the room southeast of buttress F.3301. Surprisingly, the layer turned out to be made of plaster between F.3301 and F.3376 under it, but mortar was used to separate F.5058 from F.3312/3358 underneath – the same mortar that was found between the bricks of F.5058. Also, there seems to be remains of a vertical mortar line between the lower part of F.5058 and F.2424, but this has to checked when we expose more length.
JHB worked further on 16941 until he had removed all the soil and stones to leave only the plastered parts. Still, this feature does not make too much sense. Part of it looks like a curved plastered ridge, as you would expect from a bin or a similar construction, but the rest are just lumps in weird positions, one of them covering a stone. I think if this had been in the middle of a room we would have dug it away and not paid much attention to it – I still think it is just an accumulation of plaster lumps ad two larger stones in secondary position that unfortunately just is in a place (“doorway”) where people expect something special.
JHB then moved over to investigating gap 15337 in southern wall F.3324. He followed the stone that had been visible sticking out of the gap, and found quite a substantial mortar. Especially if we assume that wall F.3324 had been preserved higher originally, and its upper part eroded after the Chalcolithic, the round gap probably was closed at the top, therefore quite narrow and the stone must be an intentional deposition rather than a product of coincidence. The gap itself turned out to be interesting, too. The thin plaster layer that covered its rounded outer face came off during cleaning, but there are more plaster lines under the stone.
GWN removed the clay ball cluster 18369 to expose in full the floor 18376 under it. This floor is made from yellowish-grey clay and has some burnt clay material and some darker material in a very thin layer on its surface. The clay balls might run under F.3333, and the whole relationship between the wall and the floors is also not clear, but we want to go a bit further down before scraping that way. After he removed 18376, GWN came down to a very compact layer of dark grey material, looking a bit like the brick material of B.106. In between the dark grey layer and 18376, there were fragments of the third floor layer in the northwest corner of the sondage; it was removed with 18376.
DLG finished working on the corner of F.2425/5050 with F.5074 to clarify their connection. As observed yesterday, the corner is very disturbed and also partially seems to be made up from larger patches or chunks of brick and mortar, rather than orderly layers. Still it seems that F.5074 would abut F.2524/5050; however, the other corners of this construction phase seem to have binding corners. We left the final decision on this to next year, and DLG moved over to the southeast corner of the building, and its connection with the northeast corner of B.105. In the remaining time, this corner is more important. He started by removing the upper brick courses of the corner of F.2424 with F.5051 to the level he took down the corner of B.107 earlier this week. These two walls are clearly binding into each other.
TET and PTW removed much more of room fill 18365 from Space 345.
I started removing the part of F.5053/5054, which is supposed to be in our wall-recognition sondage, but got only three buckets far.
Instead I stared at walls and gave loads of new feature numbers to wall phases we had been seeing for days, so that we are now quite sure about it.
In Building 106, F.3376 is a buttress under buttress F.3301. The outlines of this buttress had been showing up this season after the bottom fill in Space 454/461 had dried out, and also parts of a plaster layer are visible. What this means for last years hypothesis of a wall F.3359 under the two buttresses F.3301 and F.3302 is not yet clear; the wall might still exist.
In Building 107, the walls under the thin rubble layer in the eastern part of the building now have numbers too. F.3373 under F.3304 only shows up east of buttress F.3307, not in the west. Same is true for F.3375 under F.3306, which seemingly is not present west of F.3309. F.3374 under F.3305 runs along the entire eastern side of the building. We so far have no clear idea whether they belong with a construction phase of B.107, or are an entirely different structure, as might be indicated by the fact that they disappear under buttresses F.3307 and F.3309.
In Building 98, we now are confident to have distinguished two phases in the constructions of the walls, in addition to several plastering phases. The old feature numbers (F.5057, F.5056, F.2413/5055, F.5053/5054) were kept for the upper phase marked by two to three layers of dark mortar. Under them, F.3372, F.3370, F.3369, F.3371 are constructed from different kinds of brick, or rammed earth in the case of F.5057. Of the other features in the building (F.2428, F.5052, F.3335, F.3326, F.3324, F.3333), the upper construction phase was not preserved (surface of the mound sloping towards east). The lowermost layer of dark mortar runs into the corner of F.3333 with F.5057 but stops here, because the feature is not preserved high enough. We can therefore not know whether the upper construction phase was present in the entire building. The outermost plaster layers 16897 (Space 341) and 17238 (Space 340) cover both walls. Interestingly, the construction techniques used for the older phase also vary. For F.3372, F.3326, F.3324 and F.3333 I interpreted rammed earth. In F.3371, F.3369 and F.3370 we saw mortar and brick lines. F.5052 is debated – I see rammed earth, JHB saw and felt bricks.
This means that wall removal units of this year in B.98 are all mixed – they contain both phases in one unit. |
