| Entry: | Previously in building 105:
APV and I dug unit 31184 to an arbitrary level about 10-20 cm below the top levels. The soils and finds have been discussed in the unit sheet. The unit is probably a fill composed of wall erosion and waste disposal. The brick and mortar structure in the middle of the room (u. 18372) goes further down into the fill, and shows no breakages or other impact damage. This suggests that rather than being a piece of collapsed wall, the structure was built or laid down on purpose.
And onto the present. Today we opened unit 31210, digging further down from where we left off with unit 31184. The main goal is to find a floor surface. I wonder how we are going to recognise one. With so few buildings exposed on the West Mound, we cannot simply assume that a few centimetres down there will be a plaster floor waiting for us. Our directors are drawing possible parallels from the roughly contemporaneous settlement of Canhasan. There, in the lower stories excavated by David French, the floors were less neatly plastered or otherwise different from the plaster floors in T5. Could our floor surface actually be made of compacted clay of the kind we've been digging through over the past few days? At least the walls and the brick and mortar structure are still going further down, indicating that we are yet to reach the bottom of the room.
Interestingly, quite a few groundstones have been cropping up from units 31184 and 31210, including the granddaddy of them all: Jacob's Stone, or Fred.
Jacob's Stone is a substantial slab of groundstone (52 cm x 18 cm x c. 10 cm) with concave sides. The slab is aligned NW-SE, almost but not quite parallel to the central brick and mortar structure. There are phytoliths (s. 5) and nut shells/seeds (s. 6) in the slab's vicinity. Strangely, one corner of the slab is lodged into the brick and mortar structure. So we have a weird situation where the slab is lying on a fill surface that is later than the floor on which the brick and mortar structure must have been built. Since the slab cannot have been hanging in thin air, there must be a way of explaining this discrepancy between the two pieces. Perhaps the slab was laid on bricks that would've raised it above floor level, after which the brick and mortar structure was built to incorporate the slab. Perhaps the room was filled to the level on which the slab is now resting, after which the brick and mortar structure was raised higher with the slab once again being partially incorporated into the structure. However, these explanations make little sense at this stage. Why would you want to include only one corner of a slab in your mudbrick structure? A less tricky and more plausible explanation is that the slab was shoved into a pre-existing brick and mortar structure, and we are simply not seeing the damage because of compaction etc. That have been working on the structure during the thousands of years. We need to keep an eye out for any pre-existing structural damage when taking out the slab. |
