| Entry: | This is a diary for the 6th and 7th August. Currently we are on a 3-day Bayram excavation break, there is no work being done in the trench on the 8th, 9th (Friday anyway) and 10th August.
TET and DAB started removing room fill layer 31127 in Space 310. It is the usual heterogeneous fill, with a few exceptions. They uncovered rather homogeneous parts in the two northern corners, with the main matrix looking like the material of the surrounding walls F.3312, F.3313 and F.3314 – maybe layers of erosion, mixed with the odd artefact? DAB also investigates a larger lump of marl close to the northern wall, which however does not seem to be any constructed feature.
In B.107, JHB finished room fill layer 18398 and cluster 31101. Conservator Ashley came out to consolidate one more piece of unfired pottery.
PAB removed wall F.3344 down to the level of the burial cut of F.3342, which cut the centre of F.3344 and which has become his working platform. He found out that the wall is quite irregularly constructed – when he tries to follow mortar layers and find bricks, this turns out to be difficult as layers are wavy and discontinuous. After taking the wall down, PAB removed the fill behind/west of it (31132). This is exciting, as this is the only place in the trench where we have the outer wall of one building and then not a parallel wall of another building right next to it. However, we are also close to topsoil and this fill seems very mixed. Maybe we will see more when he comes deeper.
CMP finished removing buttress F.3356, and therewith uncovering the top surface of F.3355- which is very irregular (eroded?!), as expected. The back of the F.3355, which is preserved to greater height than the part further into the room, is hidden under wall F.3344 and will hopefully become visible once this wall is gone. I look forward to seeing more of this wall sondage.
CMP then moved to the southern wall of the building to draw a section of the wall elevation - not the entire length of the wall, but a strategic piece to record 1. how F.2426 is sitting on F.3304 is sitting on F.3373 and 2. a few weird brick-and mortar-layers in F.2426 which seem to confirm the idea of wet building rather than pre-made bricks, with the “bricks” have irregular sizes and shapes and the “mortar” layers being short and wavy.
NMR removed all of wall F.5074, coming down to the top of F.3306 (within the area designated as wall sondage area) that could be recognised as wall – it is however very disturbed, so we might have to reconsider later. She then also removed the interwall fill 31124. The plaster observed on the northern façade of F.5074 before, weird in itself, did get more confusing as it is within the wall – the brick and mortar lines continue beyond the plaster, if only a few centimetres. I currently do not have any other explanation for this than the following: F.5074 once was the southern wall of an inside space to the north, and it was plastered. Then another wall was built against this plaster – but this wall was removed for some reason, leaving only the scraps directly on the plaster. Even later, F.2429 was built parallel to F.5074. At some unknown point, F.5074 became part of B.107. It was not actually observed to be binding into F.2425/5050, so both walls do not need to be contemporary. It might bind into F.3344, we have to investigate that.
DSE in the meantime took down F.2429 which seems to be a thick double row of bricks wall – the bricks towards F.5074 do look different, triggering discussion about two parallel walls (however with mortar in between, which would be strange) – but that might only be due to this part having been drying out since 2008, while the northern half of the wall was protected from drying.
JMK continued removing room fill 31114 which does not have any special features. She also defines the walls better as she goes down – they are better preserved at this level. But: our fabulous workmen found, from her unit, some charred grains in the sieve. Our botany specialist Liz, who came out for a nice little visit, advised to take 60l flotation sample from this unit, which we did. The workmen also found charred grain from APV’s wall F.3346 and DSE’s wall F.2429 – even peas from the latter, which is rare, as Liz told us. The walls also contain East Mound sherds, though – so probably very tertiary material which means that the peas could already have been very old when they came into the walls.
APV finished taking F.3346 down to the last continuous row of bricks- the one underneath is interrupted, seemingly single bricks, not joint, put into fill. The plaster shapes 31116 behind F.3346 have not become clearer yet. We have to spend a bit more time clarifying that now, distinguishing materials - not all of it is wall plaster (presumably of wall F.3352 behind F.3346), but some is mortar (a different material with more clay and less calcium carbonate) and therefore still part of F.3346.
TSK and TMK took down F.5063 and F.2424 further. They found a layer of phytoliths within a brick which is interesting for two reasons. First, it indicates that vegetal matter was present in the bricks and also that in this particular case it was not particularly well mixed with the rest of the materials in the brick. Second, it continued from F.5063 into F.2424 (one sample taken in either feature from this layer) and therefore both features were built at once, with layers of brick and mortar continuing from F.2424 into F.5063. This contradicts the hypothesis that F.5063 was built later to support a slumping wall F.2424. And indeed – the section through F.2424 that TMK is producing by removing part of is indicates that the wall might have been constructed in this curved manner – the uppermost three preserved layers protrude further into the room than the lower layers – and all are covered in plaster, with the plaster filling the little gap created where one brick protrudes (in the form of a triangle).
TMK came across some different mortar in F.2424, further down – more yellow and sandy. This mortar was already observed last year (18392) while removing the more northern part of the wall.
JHB cut the eroded top of F.3303 flat, by removing just a little material. TSK uncovered the top of a brick in F.5063 on roughly the same level and then cut the very thick and amorphous plaster in the corner of F.5063 and F.2424 flat to see F.5063 and F.3303 on one level. We had expected to see F.3303 abutting the plastered façade of F.5063 – but that turned out not to be the case. With all the mortar and brick we see slightly irregular as usual, the whole abutting/binding question was not entirely clear at first sight – but there definitely was not plaster line. After saying “this is weird” for a few minutes, I thought that maybe TSK has already reached the inside of the underlying buttress F.3353 which F.5063 is sitting on. One strong indicating for this is that in the section through the buttress(es) TSK is producing, we see a very thick mortar layer – maybe the division between the two buttresses, the preparation layer put onto the old feature before F.5063 was built. F.3353 is very eroded, after all, and just as with F.3356 and F.3355 in B.107, is it preserved higher against the wall than towards the inside of the room. I like this theory. We will look further into it.
GWN, ASO and CLC finished removing floor 16977 (divided in all its different unit numbers for sampling) and in doing so came across old ghosts – these strange plaster lumps 31126 on the floor in the SW corner of Sp.341 that we did not look at closely last year. GWN started clarifying them by carefully scraping off micro-rests of fill left around the plaster and inside the bin (31129). The plaster now has the working title “bin”. While I am convinced that this is an intentional construction, I do not currently want to put a name on it. The little “walls” of the feature are so low that I suspect they were originally higher, but are not preserved. 31126 is sitting directly on the floor 16977 which is slightly more yellowish in colour so both can be distinguished. And it is connected to the wall plaster on surrounding walls F.3369 and F.3370.
CLC and ASO scraped the layer under the removed floor 16977 and saw a very bright cream-coloured layer with a dark grey patch in the centre of Sp.450. As a working hypothesis, we though these were two different layers of fill, with the dark (31134) possibly being a disturbance in the bright layer (31133). This turned out to be incorrect, after CLC and cut back the section of the little 2012-sondage to create a fresh section, and ASO has removed a little of the dark layer 31134 which also created a section (part of the big section that will develop through the centre of B.98) in which we could see the removed floor F.16977, underneath a very thin grey layer, and then another floor. This is the exact same sequence as observed in the 2012 sondage in front of Wall F.3333, where however the diving layer 18367 between upper floor 16977 and second floor 18376 was thicker. After this, we knew that the cream layer uncovered in the entire half building already is the second floor 18376, with the dividing layer 18367 being so thin that it could not be recognised when 16977 was removed – it is only left in some pockets. The dark fill ASO excavated a little of is already part of the dark grey layer already observed last year under the second floor 18376 (fill 18377) – maybe floor 18376 was not preserved here, or so thin that it was accidentally removed during the excavation of 16977. Therefore, both unit numbers 31133 and 31134 were already abandoned after a few hours and we will now deal with the second floor.
JHB came into B.98 to check out the bins 16941 excavated last year – or rather their surrounding. So far, they are not stratigraphically connected to any wall features. After scraping the inside of Space 446, it seemed that the bins were built against plaster on a short mud brick feature (darker grey against more mixed fill in Sp.446) running EW and therefore blocking Space 452 from Sp.446. JHB also saw a few lumps of the dark crumbly clayey mortar that looks similar to than in e.g. the upper walls in B.107 or even in B.98. He started scraping around it and found that it seems to form a layer – possibly a surface? More about that in the next days.
Before the end of the work day, we had a very nice trench tour during which everybody talked about their area for a little bit and people asked questions. Some lab specialists came out for that, and it was a really nice end of the first (short) excavation week. I look forward to more. |
