| Entry: | This is a dairy for 25th August – the last excavation day in Trench 5 for this season – and forever.
DSE in Space 310 removed the marl lumps he uncovered in removing layer 31232 and during removal confirmed that the marl did not form constructed feature, and also does not continue below the level he reached today – where however new large white lumps are appearing, nothing unusual in our room fills. He then cleaned the surrounding walls, which are plastered however this plaster is very moist and therefore crumbly, it is hard to clean them. The facades of the walls are very irregular, generally curving inwards at the level he reached now. We were not entirely sure whether or not F.3376 continues down into unexcavated – it looked like it might have stopped just above the current level of the room fill, but we have made such assumptions before and know that it is dangerous to declare a wall finished just because we cannot find it in an area of a few cm. unfortunately we will never go further down to confirm.
JMK in Space 454 levelled her room fill 31199 and cleaned the surrounding walls which all have very nicely preserved plaster except for F.3314, where plaster was only preserved in the lower part. The plastered facades clearly indicate how irregular facades of walls can be – that of F.5058 is very bumpy, that of F.3362 is curving inwards heavily in the east, but not so much in the west. The plaster 31231 in the SE corner remains mysterious. There surely is a horizontal part of it that is connected to the plaster of the walls F.3314 and F.3362, but there also was a lot of amorphous plaster around that which clouded the situation severely. Whatever it was (installation?), we cannot recognise any more at this time. Very very badly preserved. Very interesting, however, in the NW corner of the room was a small but well preserved piece 31255 of what seems to have been a roughly horizontal, thick layer of the greenish coarse plaster that we saw used for floors e.g. in Space 345. 31255 was firmly attached to the well preserved plaster on F.3376 and F.3312. Then we remembered that NMR and JMK encountered more pieces of such plaster along the façade of F.3376 before, investigated them shortly, but they seemed to be irregular and not clearly attached to the buttress, so we removed them. Apparently this surface went further into the room, but it only preserved where it was more protected against the wall. I wonder – intentionally removed? It would seem weird if such a seemingly very stable, because thick and made from sturdy material, layer would just disintegrate by itself while more fragile things in the room are perfectly preserved.
I spent some more time with F.3386. It is covered in plaster on the southern façade towards Space 454, and today after cleaning DSE also saw a plaster line in Space 310 – the upper part of the feature is less well preserved, but the plaster starts further down. The plaster 31254 on the features is missing in some patches, but generally thick and well preserved. F.3386 was built in between F.3314 and F.3376, abutting the plastered face of the buttress and probably also that of the wall, whose plaster is however not well preserved in general. The plastered layer 31254 on top of F.3386 seems to be smeared up against the surrounding features, but this fragile connection is lost in many spots.
I wonder what F.3386 might have been. Just a plastered threshold? This is the first feature we found that is plastered from the top. We are sure that it is a constructed feature because parts of the plaster are missing towards Space 310 and we can see mortar and mud brick lines. Maybe this feature could strengthen my hypothesis that the living/use surface inside the buildings moved upwards during use and is not necessarily associated with any specific features (base, top, whatever) of any surrounding wall.
TET and PAB cleaned the newly excavated area but scraping and levelling, with quick success – we found the outlines of continuing walls F.5075 and F.5068 easily, marked by plaster lines, just as the southern part of buttress F. 5076 and the southern wall F.3393 of our new Space 525 in new Building 126 ! (Space 448 is now called Building 127). Parallel to the southern wall F.3393, they found wall F.3394 of the next building – not surprising-, easily recognisable by bricks and mortar in the section. Part of the F.5058-F.3393 corner is also in the trench section, here we seem to see that the features are not made up from brick and mortar. It is nice that the entire Space 525 is plastered, that made it much easier to find.
GWN clarified the outlines of buttress F.3387 in B.125, which unfortunately remains a little bit of a mystery as the very heterogeneous orange-black layer seems to both abut (from west) and run under the wall feature (from south). GWN also had time to do some more investigations of this very mixed layer, and to remove a very black area 31245 for botany analysis. I think we did all we could for this phase in the limited time, but am still sad because I think this would have been a very interesting context to excavate. The “burnt” layer almost certainly has a complex micro-stratigraphy that would have been nice to investigate and interpret, especially as we only had very few areas with fire impact in the trench so far. Also the abrupt end of the buttress feature, which really seems to be only a few cm thick preserved, is interesting. Well, at least we got a good first impression of B.125.
CLC checked out the colourful corner of (removed) F.5052 and F.3335. She found out that the surface of floor 16977 was affected by fire in a way to render parts of it dark red (31247). Also, there are remains of another layer of marl with (painted?) red surface 31250 abutting the plaster of F.3335, shaped like a mini-mini-basin and apparently disturbed towards south. Then there are more orange patches around. While this situation is too disturbed to say much about function (maybe something will come from all the flot samples), it supports the impression that much more care went into furnishing B.98 for use than we previously noticed.
TSK cut a quarter out of installation F.3385 to check what might be underneath. We found no surprises, only the sequence we knew already, the wall 31126 sitting on floor layer 16977, with grey fill 18377 under it – interestingly no second floor under 16977.
TSK then moved to also cut installation F.3391, where he confirmed that the grey clay surface 31240 observed outside the installation is the same that also forms the floor of F.3391, it just looks different inside the installation because it is dusted in orange and has a baked surface. TSK saw one more floor layer 31252 under 31240, so three floor layers in this area of the building. The floors seem to be interesting, as we now have confirmed in our different sondages that not all areas of the house have equal amount of floor layers.
TMK straightened the sections of this sondage, and in doing so uncovered more of a ground stone that is protruding from one of the walls – it is large and has a depression and a hole. Very interesting! TMK sampled the fill of the depression.
AVP removed western buttress F.5062 and wall F.3346 to the level of the surrounding room fill, both still continue into unexcavated. Seeing the two sections she produced was very interesting. In both, the spacing of mud brick and mortar lines was extremely irregular, lines were discontinuous, there was an odd red brick in there and a layer of some other red material. This irregularity made it impossible to check what we had cut the section for: to see whether F.5062 is going down all the way (in which case it would be more than 2m high) or sitting on some older construction. It is absolutely possible that one of the irregularities indicates a phase break. It certainly indicates a fresh and impressionistic approach towards building. |
