| Entry: | CMP worked further on clarifying walls in B.107 – SW corner by removing fill 31168. It is now clear that the wall under F.2426 in this corner has a slightly different outline/size and reaches further into the room than F.2426 (ca. 15cm). It has a very irregular (eroded!?) shape. F.2426 and F.3344 are clearly not bonded – odd. The three corners of the building we investigated so far had non-bonded corner. Not very stable. Maybe also different phases? Only the connection of F.3344 and F.5074 has not been investigated yet.
The wall situation is still not entirely clear, due to ground stone sticking in what seems like the very corner of the walls. But the walls are generally well visible, that is good for now. We just do not know yet WHICH walls that are. Rather, which wall phase that is. We see two walls on top of each other in the entire western part of the building, west of the northern and southern buttress – not three. Which phase is missing? So far, I suspect it is the second (middle) wall phase. This phase has mud brick and mortar, but we seem to see walls without mortar lines in this western building. It remains interesting!
Also, CMP found something that she and PFB believe to be a posthole (31197, fill 31198) in that little horizontal surface produced by the wall under F.2426 protruding into the room. I am not so sure, it could also be a lump of marl and something reddish with a convenient rodent hole in the centre.
We decided that CMP should now move to the NW corner of the room, to do similar investigations there.
APV and TMK worked further on their erosion fill layer 31184. Special observations from today was another piece of wall with brick and mortar just next to 18372 more towards the SE; a greater denseness of pottery in the NW corner; and a greater denseness of marl (plaster?) lumps in the NE corner, which looked nicely black-white.
TSK paused work on the eastern buttress in B.105 and went over to the southern buttress. He observed three different plaster layers on the eastern part of the buttress – a nicely preserved thick layer 31193 covering a larger area of the feature. Seemingly the faint remains of a second layer 31195 on 31193. And a curious longish plaster ridge (vertical) 31194 whose original function and shape (it is clearly not completely preserved) is unclear to us, but which was abutted by the lower buttress F.3366, which shows us that this lower feature is later then F.3353, both plaster layers and whatever function 31194 had.
I still cannot make a story of this. I am not sure whether the fact that not all features are contemporary does contradict the two storey theory. It is generally possible that the upper features were added to an already existing house to make it two-storeyed. Why not. The more I think about it, this seems like the most logical explanation to why the hell anybody would build like this.
NMR and TET removed the last (!!!) plaster layer in the pancake stack of plaster layers 16932. They were happy to then get out the picks to start removing fill 31199 under the plaster. NMR first removed the grey soil under where the plaster sloped up to the wall, and cut it back to the section we made through the room. The question was . plastered fill or construction? Just by looking at the freshly cut section, that was not entirely clear. I am 50-50. If it is a construction, we should be able to find that out when going further down. TET approached the northern part of the room and scraped the “tooth” left with plaster layer 16999, where buttress F.3302 was removed last year. After scraping (vertical), we seemed to see mortar and mud brick layer, indicating that there was an older buttress under F.3302, twin of 3376 – how nice! It was, however, not visible clearly in plan, also due to the fact that we only opened an L-shaped sondage in the south and east of the room. We might investigate the buttresses more later, but for now the focus is on the sondage. First, to find out whether there is anything under the plaster 16932 related to it. Tomorrow.
DSE was happily picking away in his rich fill 31189 in Space 310. He shortly investigated the walls around and found out they were plastered. The fill is more garden-soil like then we are used too – less different kinds of clay and other soils. Different from what we are used to in the room. Exciting! More soon.
GWN finished removing the dark grey layer 18377 and pot cluster 31191. After that, a massive layer of sometimes more reddish, sometimes more yellowish fill was visible in the entire sondage area (31196), which GNW also started removing and could follow down 15cm so far. While 18377 was quite void of larger finds and inclusions, and therefore seems like a specially prepared preparation layer for the erection of the building, 31196 now is becoming more artefact- and inclusion-rich.
JMK finished her mini-railway sondage through Space 446. The new EW wall F.3379 is now quite well visible in the two east and west section, its upper part shaped amorphously. It is unfortunately not that clear in plan, but clear enough. We decided to go deeper in front of the wall (in the Space 446-452 border region) which will at the same time be like a second subfloor-sondage complementing GWN’s work in the south of the building.
ASO and PAB are happily removing more fill in 448 (31169), so far without finding construction features, but with many nice finds including to very large pot sherds and three fragments of Gelveri-type pottery. |
