| Entry: | Since the workstations would not cooperate earlier, here’s a brief retrospective on Wednesday 7 August.
Third day in a row with frustratingly little progress on wall 2424. This far I haven’t had a one single day when I could’ve worked exclusively on the wall. I’d like to be done with it, since Peter wants to get to the floor/fill below. So now I wish there won’t be any further finds hiding within the brick and mortar.
Before I was able to resume cutting the wall down, I dealt with a lense of phytoliths that extended from the wall to buttress 5063. The lense was perhaps 30 cm across and up to 2 mm thick, made up of long silica particles. The lense was photographed and sampled (S 9). Archaeobotanists visiting the provisionally identified the silica as particles of some long-stemmed plants, probably reeds.
Apparently in this region it’s an ongoing custom to cover structures with reed. It’d be interesting to study what kinds of traces these practices leave on modern surfaces and compare them to the ones we encounter. Is there any practical reason for spreading out your reed on brick and leaving it there - to soak up moisture maybe? Perhaps this could help us understand whether the west mounders were building their houses with dried bricks or by laying out the structures with moist, malleable stuff.
The continuity of the phytolith lense across the wall and the buttress indicates that these features were built simultaneously. There’s further evidence that supports this interpretation. Till has been excavating buttress 5063 further. Just before finishing up for the day he discovered something that for the time being looks like a mess of mortar and mudbrick. Jana was surprised by the finding as it may once again revise our ideas about the wall/buttress construction sequence. What on the surface looks like a continuous sequence of wall and buttress is actually the product of several building phases, with building sequences punctuated by thicker layers of mortar foundations.
In other words, it seems that rather than having grown horizontally, the wall-buttress complex grew vertically, both features being built at the same time, sequence by sequence. This could explain the wall plastering which seems to have been laid out in one single event, as I hypothesised in the previous entry (Tuesday 6 August). Furthermore, I’ve recently noticed a change in the mortar colour in the middle of the sequence. While the mortar in the upper layers is white, like the plaster (or halva without pistachios), the colour turns warmer reddish/yellowish towards the middle parts of the sequence. This plaster will probably be sampled for further analysis, and a new unit opened for it. Even now, it’s quite safe to say that there is clear change in the mortar mixture used, and this could be further interpreted as evidence for several building phases.
As a final note, Daniela noted a break running diagonally through the north-facing section of 2424. This fits into the scenario where we have the wall sloping into building 105 and the bricks broken down in the process. However, this need to be checked whilst excavating as the "break" could also be an exposed root canal - there‘s plenty of bioturbation in these upper layers. |
