| Entry: | Today I continued excavating the northeast corner of b. 105. As yesterday, the corner in general seems much better preserved and more understandable than any of the corners of b. 107. This seems a little strange as the material, both the brick and the mortar, is far softer than that of b. 107. Of course, this is not to say that there are not animal burrows in the walls, but that these burrows do not obscure the corners as thoroughly in 105 as in 107. There was an interesting part of the construction of the corner where the Eastern wall of the building was intended to run up to the Northern wall on this particular course, but through lack of planning or some other quirk of construction, the last brick of the Eastern wall stopped a good half meter before the Northern wall. KTX mentioned that in his building he often noticed that when faced with a similar dilemma, the builders of b. 106 had used custom sized mud bricks to fill in the gap, however the builders of 105 decided to solve their dilemma by filling the gap with mortar. This huge chunk of mortar was photographed and sampled, both for floatation and for the archive. While removing this "mortar brick" I noticed that its interior face had been plastered. After consulting with JMR, it was decided to open a new unit for this plaster, to clean it, photograph it, and remove it. This last part proved much more difficult than we had anticipated as the plaster was far more extensive and thicker than we had thought and far harder and more difficult to remove than it first appeared. Once the plaster was removed, it seemed that there was a bizarre phasing phenomenon going on it the corner. This freaky phasing is not yet understood as it was just found, but tomorrow I am planning on taking down the corner to that level in order to get a better look at the messed up area. We are not planning on sifting the mud bricks tomorrow as it is the last day and time is of an essence. Normally I wouldn't want to leave these mud bricks unsifted, but as the corner I am digging is such a relatively small area of the respective walls, there will be plenty of the walls left for next year to closer examine the composition of and inclusions within the mud bricks. |
