| Entry: | This was the last day of proper excavation. Of course that meant finding unexpected things in places where we are just trying to finish off what we thought we knew. In my case, this meant discovering that the single wall I was removing was actually two built on top of each other. The interesting freaky phasing thing I noticed yesterday with the plaster on the interior wall of the corner of b. 105 turned out to be exactly that. Where it seemed that the wall jutted out in a weird way, turned out to be the top of an earlier wall. I had suspected that something like that would be the case, but while removing courses of the wall, I noticed that at exactly that point, the mortar shifted from the white sandy mortar that was so typical of the upper wall to a white cagey mortar, similar in texture and consistency to the mortar of b. 107, but white in color. I was also surprising because the mudbrick from the two phases seem to be identical in makeup. At first I was surprised by its presence and thought it belonged to the inner ring of wall that lined the building, but as it continued across the excavate area, I realized that it was indeed part of the phase of the wall. I would have wanted to remove one course of the inner wall to get a better idea of how the walls joined up, but as it was the end of the day, I had to let it lie. It will have to remain until next year when someone will be able to investigate the two walls with enough time to really see how they were integrated within the building. |
