| Entry: | Today I started to work in building 106, space 454. The main goal is to figure out if what we have here is a collapsed floor, how this surface is working and how it relates to the so-called transitional plaster that we see a bit higher in the surroundings wall. The center of the space as well as the eastern wall and the western buttress were disturbed by a huge pit that has been removed in the past years (Fill = unit 16933). A white plaster (?) layer remains in the southern part of the room at the bottom of the pit. Maybe it existed in the northern part as well and was disturbed by the pit or something else. This plastered surface has already been attributed the unit number 16932, but the specific part I am excavating will get the number 31142. We will do a west-east section and remove the southern part of the room surface. There indeed seem to be several layers of white plaster, brown earth, orange earth, ashes and maybe another white layer above each other. We will remove them one by one and float them. They will all get a separate unit number as long as we don’t know what we have here. At least the first white layer tends to be sloping down towards north and then going up again. Our section cuts through the lowest point. We would also like to clear how this white layer is connecting to a higher structure in the west part of the building, sloping towards east and seemingly a fill covered by a plaster layer. Those two plasters seem to be still connected by a ca. 1cm thick white band. It is however unclear whether it is connecting with the plaster layer (18387) on top of the west structure, or with one that seems to be 1cm under it, both separated by a thin fill (18391). I rather tend for the lower one, as did JMR last year. The removal of this triangular shaped brick-like block on the western structure will help us clear this tomorrow. My day was mainly spent brushing the top of the unit before excavating and removing the white layer. At its southern limit it was only 1mm thick, but at the section at least 1cm. It might have been thicker towards south before the pit was dug. The surface under it is quite irregular, brown-greyish earth, so it was sometimes quite hard not to mix two layers, especially since there seems to be a second white one under the thin brown-greyish earth. No found except a tiny green stone and a 0,5cm piece of charcoal.
Tomorrow I will continue following the white layer under the western structure and hopefully see how they connect. After I will try to follow the other layers one by one and see what they tell us. The time today was passing so quickly, I have the feeling I just started excavating and suddenly it was 3pm and I have the feeling I haven’t manage to dig as much as I hoped to. Hard to find a balance between being precise and quick! |
