| Entry: | The team arrived on Friday and cleaned the trench yesterday (Saturday) and today. After cleaning, photos were taken and then excavation started.
GWN, ASO and EIH are working in B.98. The aim for this season is to find out what is under floor 16977. For this, the southern half of the building (taking the middle of buttresses F.3326 and F.5053/5054 as the dividing line) will be excavated down as far as we have to excavate to know what is under the building. The construction features remain untouched for now, until we find out how they relate to whatever is under them.
GWN, ASO and EIH started removing the floor 16977. They are removing the floor in rectangular patches (U.31102-31107 – these are parts of floor 16977, with the new numbers only given for sampling purposes) - maybe differences will occur between different areas of the building. Most of the material is taken as flotation samples; sediment that is suspected to not be floor, but already the fill underneath, was dry sieved.
The sediments under the floor 16977 appear grey, but with slight differences that might turn out to be something. The floor itself does not look as nice and white as it looked when it was fresh last year – but it is recognisable when working from the section that GWN produced last year when digging a little sondage in the SW corner of Space 449.
NMR and DSE are taking down construction features in the NE corner of B.107. This will produce a great section through the northern buttress F.3339 and F.3309 (or what is left of it) underneath, the northern wall(s) F.5074 on top of wall F.3306 on top of wall F.3375, the parallel wall F.2429 belonging to the next building to the north, and western walls F.2425/5050 on top of wall F.3305 on top of F.3374. This will allow us to recognise and document stratigraphic relations between ball these features to confirm phasing. It will also allow us a quick look into the inside of these features, and opportunities to observe and sample their materials and construction techniques.
For now, NMR and DSE are removing what is left of walls F.5074 and F.2425/5050 in this part of the building - not much. They again found that the corner of these two walls seems to have been built quite irregularly, with the very corner being made of from brick fragments rather than actually bricks. Which makes me wonder whether this was maybe a corner being built against already existing walls F.2429 and F.2413/5055 (and related buildings) – which would make B.107 later.
Another observation we made earlier in the season: the south wall F.2426 of B.107 has a very irregular thickness; it is much wider in the west and has a funny shape that must have been difficult to be built with bricks. Same suspicious as for the dog-legged southern wall of B.98: the wall was made to have this funny shape because had to fit neatly alongside a pre-existing wall (in the case of F.2426: F.5051 of B.105) but also to fit some concept of how the interior of the building was meant to look like.
With these observations, we would have the following sequence of building erection
1 – B.106
2 – B.98
3 – B.107.
How does B.105 fit in here? Older than B.107, but how does it relate to B.106? Maybe we will know more later in the season. Also: as every building had several wall phases, such generalisation are problematic and it would be even more thrilling to find out that e.g. the upper phase of one building was built some time between the two walls phases of an adjacent building – but we might not be that lucky.
Back to what is happening in the trench right now. PAB and CMP are cutting a section through buttresses F.3355, F.3356, wall F.3344 behind them and the fill underneath. One aim is to clarify stratigraphic relations between the buttresses and the wall. Another aim is to, once F.3344 and the fill under it is gone, excavate a bit more towards west and maybe maybe find the older wall, belonging to the wall phase of F.3304 and F.3306 – supposedly hidden behind the fill under the base of F.3344.
They started by removing F.3356 which is sitting on F.3355 and confirmed the very exciting observation we made last year: F.3355 has a very irregular upper surface onto which F.3356 was built, so that this irregular surface was preserved. Supposedly the three other buttresses F.3309, F.3308 and F.3307 also had irregular surfaces – which made it so hard for us to locate them and which led to us cutting them into rather rectangular shapes which do not reflect they actual preserved state. PAB and CMP exposed nearly the entire top of the buttress F.3356 (half of it anyway, as we are going to cut the buttress in half), a slight rest remains.
JHB in the meantime has been working further on his cluster 31101 and surrounding room fill 18398. It takes time because of the cluster of unfired pottery had to be carefully taken out. Part of it were consolidated by conservator Ashley today for pottery specialist IF. Also, the fill unit 18398 itself contains exciting finds.
JMK is excavating a sondage of room fill 31114 in the SE corner of B.107. The aim of this sondage is to see more of the lowermost wall phase F.3373 and F.3374, of which only the upper ca. 15cm are visible. We want to confirm the existence of these walls and get a slightly better impression of their nature, building material, construction method. The room fill so far is what we are used to – very mixed, with a lot of finds.
In B.105, we are doing two strategic sections, one through features in the west, and one in the east, as the stratigraphic sequences seem to be different in either part of the building – some features in the west are visibly sitting on fill, their bases much higher than those of features in the east, where we do not see any bases so far.
TSK and TMK are cutting through buttresses F.5063 and F.3353, wall F.2424 and whatever is under that. They might even carry the section back to also cut wall F.5058 and F.3312 of neighbouring B.106. It is entirely unclear how all these features relate, but we had to start with some feature, so we decided to remove (half of) F.5063 even though it is not clear whether this buttress is sitting on (younger than) F.3353 or whether F.3353 is abutting the very lowest part of F.5063.
TET and APV are working on a section through the western buttress F.5062, wall F.502 behind it, and wall F.3346 next to them. Here, it seems fairly clear that F.3346 is abutting F.5062, so it goes first. They started taking it down (half of it) and came across many strange lumps and lines of eroded plaster along the interfaces of the walls which might turn out to be something – maybe eroded wall plaster? We will see.
B.105 is another focus this season, the phasing is so unclear, and we cannot leave the trench before figuring this out. The parts we understand so far do not seem to indicate nice and planned construction activities – but maybe that is just how it was. |
