| Entry: | So, what’s new in the girls’ trench? Today we finished to remove the first 10 cm of u. 17272 in the whole area. It consisted only of room fill with a lot of collapsed material (mud bricks, plaster lumps). There were still the same black patches I mentioned few days ago. Nothing new under the sun (I really don't know if I can use this expression in English).
Then FKJ, JMR and me started to excavate the bottom of the walls, benches and buttress all around our space (F. 5062, f. 3346, f. 3311, f. 5061, f. 3310, f. 3303 and f. 3353).
=> The bottom of the buttress F.5062 : behind a large strip of collapsed compact plaster, the plaster of the feature and its surface were well preserved and clearly visible. The compact plaster that collapsed apparently protected the wall surface from post-depositional affections. We can mention the presence of a flat semi circular two centimetres thick plaster deposit apparently attached to the buttress (?). If we were in a roman context I would think about a quarter or a half of a column. But as this is not a roman context, I think nothing about that. Let's see if we find others tomorrow.
=> The bottom of the Northwest corner ("benches" F. 3346- F. 3311). Its limits had been unclear since our arrival. Finally, the construction was just few centimetres away from where we expected it to be. The plaster is not conserved, but the lines of mud bricks are really clear. We don't really understand the function of this feature, which becomes too tall to be a bench. Is it a shelf, or a stand for something that disappeared?
=> The bottom of the buttress F. 5061: We did not touch the "bottom area" of the entire buttress. The eastern and western face will be examined tomorrow. The room facing or southern face was partly exposed. To reach the vertical outlines of the buttress on the southern face we needed to take out some mud brick (fragments) that lay above the edge of the real vertical outlines. One mud brick was clearly covering fragments of a pot that leaned against the buttress. This leads me to the conclusion that parts of the upper buttress might have been collapsed or slightly shifted and so covered the room fill. (Probably a good argument to start a new unit?)
=> The bottom of the Northeast corner (F. 3310-F. 3303): remains unclear. We can notice a construction made of mud bricks leaning on or being part of F. 3303, with the presence of three mud bricks in a row and partly surrounding plaster.
=> The bottom of the bench/buttress F. 3353: we found the mud brick construction. No plaster conserved at the front.
At the (very) end of the day we are now able to define almost all the limits of the space 342.
As the precedent days, a lot of finds were discovered (in total 39 X-finds for now). A part of them shows the coherence of the room fill between our space and the area excavated by EUR and SO in the south of the building: fragments of different pots (2 fragments each pot) from both units / parts of the room could be joined.
This coherence indicates a very short period of filling for the entire room |
