| Entry: | My first day of excavating West Mound building 105 with Till. We’re clearing a buttress (F. 5063) out of the way to figure out the building sequence of the house: was the buttress built to support the walls, or were the walls added after the buttress? A layer of plaster between the wall and the buttress could suggest the former. Whatever the outcome will be, the aim is to get closer to the decisions of the builders, who were constructing the houses pretty erratically given the variation in building materials used.
The variation could be partly explained with the crumbliness of the building materials, the houses needing apparently frequent repairs and rebuilding and thus providing a medium for the occupants to experiment with different approaches whilst being constrained by the previous infrastructure. Whether one believes any such patterns were more strongly due to material constraints (e.g. due to restricted access to materials, maybe suggested by the recycling of stuff in the brick and mortar) or to deliberate decisions is probably a matter of taste rather than something that can be empirically investigated at the current scale of the excavation.
It is interesting how people seemed to stick with the increasingly cramped buildings, buttressing them against collapse. Has anyone studied whether the environmental conditions on the West Mound differed from those of the East Mound, necessitating more substantial supports?
Finally, I hope that my initial clumsiness and indecisiveness in the trench will subside once I get more familiar with how things are done here. |
