| Entry: | GWN and CLC continued investigating feature and “burnt layer” in the phase under B.98 which now has the working title Building 125! CLC found a corner, so there really is a wall behind the buttress F.3387, of which we do not see the eastern limit. GWN followed the “burnt” layer southwards and downwards, where it becomes more varied, with orange and black, and varying in top level, too. We hope he will reach the southern part of that wall. CLC are taking loads of samples for botany analysis and also found us a nice articulated bone for dating. The burnt layer is of course messy (meaning made up of many different materials, affected by fire to many different degrees), so we are now focussed on seeing its general extend and character in the remaining time without going to much into detail any clarifying every cm of variation.
I checked out a small area where a few small clay lumps concentrated under where we removed wall F.3335, which had looked like a pebble floor to PFB when he saw the trench the other day. It turns out the layer does not continue and also there are only two stones in it, so no pebble floor.
Towards the end of the day, CLC started cleaning (scraping and brushing) the orange layers in the ex-corner of where “wall-tress” F.5052/F.3335 had been. We will see what she uncovers there.
TSK found us a new installation F.3391 today. He started scraping around that orange patch we had seen in the corner of F.3324 and F.3326 in Space 452, and found that this orange was – presumably burnt – sterile clay filling a shallow (cut?) installation formed by a small wall 31242 on top of floor layer 31240. A very thin layer of grey fill 31241 separates the installation wall from the floor, maybe indicating a certain time gap between the construction of either. The whole thing was covered by floor 16977. Floor 31240 might be the same as 18376 in the southern part of the building, investigated by GWN and CLC, but as we did not investigate that area between the two sondages, that remains unconfirmed. We do not have the northern end of the installation. It is possible that JMK truncated it with her sondage, but also the feature seems to fade out towards north, maybe it was not preserved here. I wonder first, what this little basin was used for, and second, how it came to be filled with the powdery orange clay. Anyway, it is a nice little feature enlightening the biography of the house, as it postdates the second floor and predated the first (uppermost floor).
DSE nearly finished his room fill layer 31232 and with it uncovering the many plaster lumps inside the room – which seems to be in secondary position to me, but look like a feature to PFB.
JMK nearly finished her layer 31199 except for wall cleaning. We started removing some of the fill against the walls and noticed that all features (except for the problematic eastern wall) have thick and well preserved plaster on their facades. JMK also, apart from many many other nice finds, found articulated bone under where the plaster layer stack 16932 had been – datable material!
I tried to tease out the mysterious construction feature F.3386 dividing Space 310 and 454. The basic impression that this feature was built abutting the plaster of F.3379, the big buttress, and the eastern wall F.3314 remains correct. I removed the room fill that was left on the feature, and came down to a plaster layer that seemingly covers the top of F.3386 – a plastered threshold? I also found its plastered southern façade, no plaster seems to be preserved on the northern façade where DSE already sees mortar and brick layers from inside Space 310.
APV continued her wall sondage in the doorway area. We cut the wall under the threshold in NS direction and removed the western part of it, against the plaster of F.3363. She removed the wall until below the level where the plaster of F.3363 ended. Theoretically, F.3368, abutting this plaster, would have to be a later construction than F.3392 which runs UNDER F.3363. However, we could not clearly see a horizontal division between these features in the section, so the existence of these two distinct walls is more based on theoretical considerations than on actual observation. But also mind that we found the same with the two northern buttresses F.5061 on F.3365 – apparently, when building features on top of other features, often the spacing of the mortar and mud brick layers remained quite regular (as regular as it gets in Trench 5) so it is difficult to actually see the two different walls on top of each other in section.
Neither could we see any vertical mortar lines in the centre of the walls F.3368 and F.3392 – both are thick, but apparently not made from parallel rows of brick.
TMK continued going down in his sondage in B.105. First, he cleaned the facades of the surrounding buttresses F.3366 and F.3353 and confirmed that he found their base – the red layer 31224 and the white layer 31238 and everything below is UNDER those features – and presumably under all other features, too. After removing those two, TMK came down to more greyish fill 31239 which contained more finds than the very sterile (presumably purposefully sterile) red and white layers had – we might be in room fill of the next architectural phase?
PAB and TET with our workman Orhan got out the great picks and in no time took out that little corner of the trench, south of Space 345, that was still under topsoil so far - with the intention to find the space mirroring 345 and thus finding the entire building. They got so much soil moved; we had a few flecks of red brick that could have been associated with Byzantine burials, but turned out to be in secondary or tertiary position. We are not yet clean on the level where the walls are supposed to appear; tomorrow! |
