| Entry: | After two weeks of removing infill, we are finally near the floor of B. 131! We spent some time chasing a phantom surface that appeared clear in the section left by Aldo and Agata last year, but it turned out just to be a very clear and discrete layer of infill… lying on top of our very burnt, very black surface layer. We have been told how difficult it is in this building to chase its layers across its entirety but today was our first firstthand experience with it. So tomorrow we will hopefully be pleasantly surprised by how comparatively easy it is to identify the surface layer of the building.
Our northern wall F. 7707 continues to have conservation concerns. Every day we arrive to have a small amount of plaster fallen from the top. We've commented before that it must have been amazingly strong to apparently cause the Neolithians cutting foundation trench F. 7563 to avoid it (but not the mud bricks it was attached to) but of course the North shelter winds are very determined, so the unsupported top portion is having a trial surviving. Since it will be best to treat this wall plaster once we've reached the bottom of it, it's an added incentive to reach the floor.
We also have an incentive to get in phase (currently held up by burial F. 7714); there's going to be an experiment using our building to combine 3D GIS modeling with specialist data, to help bridge the continued gap between excavation and laboratory investigation. It will start once we can finish excavating the room fill (u. 22617 and u. 22635) in the dog-leg room sp. 556, and once the archaebotany team and Nico set up the data structure. So, the two goals we have of course had anyway-- reach the floor and get the whole building in phase-- have these additional reasons for us to complete them as quickly as possible. |
