| Entry: | NB: Initially, unit 16850 was erroneously called 16848. Unit numbers have now been corrected for the coordinates, finds bags and recording sheets.
Slow progress on wall 2424 (unit 16850) due to delays following the reopening of building 106, but will get a good deal done tomorrow. I took down the wall by about 10 cm, encountering charcoal and a layer of phytoliths in the process. The phytoliths, which Till also found within buttress 5063, will be sampled tomorrow. After this, the unit will be photographed before being taken down to the same level with buttress 5063. This leveling may give a better idea of the building sequence, which still remains a bit of a mystery.
In yesterday's entry I suggested that the buttress 5063 was built after the wall to keep the wall from collapsing into building 105. Today I got a look at the section where plaster from the buttress and the wall meets. Although any sequencing in the plasterings was difficult to discern, the plaster from the buttress seemed to intersect the wall's plaster. I’ll now consider the possibility of the buttress plastering having preceded rather than followed the wall plastering.
If this sequencing (buttress before the wall plaster) is true, then several possible interpretations arise. The wall and the buttress could have been roughly contemporaneous, built and plastered within a short period. If this was the case, then the butting of the wall wouldn't have been a reaction to the sloping, but rather a preventive method that was simultaneously reproducing the concept of the west mound house. Perhaps these people actually knew what they were doing, having probably lived on the budding mound-to-be and passed on their knowledge through generations!
Or maybe the wall was nude in the beginning and only plastered at some later point when the buttress was built to prevent collapse? Or was the wall scraped of previous plaster before being replastered along with the buttress – perhaps previous plaster layers had started cracking and crumbling as the wall's sloping progressed, necessitating complete reworking of the wall surface?
Jana thinks that the plaster was simply pushed into the corner between the wall and the buttress and thus there wouldn't have been any temporal difference between the wall and the buttress plastering. This is probable as the plaster from both contexts does seem similar in consistency and colour and without clear boundaries, suggesting a single plastering event. This being the case, the plastering does not inform us on the wall/buttress sequence.
Right now, most evidence (sloping of the wall, uniform plaster layer) still seems to support the hypothesis that the buttress postdates the wall, having been built to prevent collapse. But what sort of a time gap are we talking about: hours, days, years? Also, the question remains whether the wall had any plastering before being buttressed. Furthermore, if the phytolith layer turns out to continue undisturbed from the wall to the buttress, we may be dealing with contemporaneous rather than subsequent structures.
Hopefully by the end of tomorrow we'll have a better idea of how the inhabitants of 105 dealt with their wall. Were they sufficiently informed to foresee wall collapse and prepare for it right at the beginning? Or were they reacting to the unexpected only when cracking wall plaster alerted them to the necessity of buttressing, despite the cramping of the space that would follow? Or were they simply following the concept of the west mound house with its buttresses, without too much worry about the function of such structures? From a theoretical POV, intentionality in the buttressing and plastering decisions seems a much more attractive and interesting hypothesis than blind reproduction of cultural norms. |
