| Entry: | We started excavating again today. Gavin and Serap took out wall 15 in Space 70. The wall comprised irregular bricks and a little plaster on its N face. The highly burnt floor of Space 70 continued beautifully under the wall, showing that wall 15 was installed, as suspected, after the burning of the building. Space 70 looks much the better for the removal of the wall. Louise is now working on the removal of Feature 20, the curving wall with plaster surfaces in the SW corner of Space 71. Complex plaster lines are appearing underneath, perhaps connected to the now gone feature originally on the E face of wall 3. I think we must accept that Feature 20 is in situ and has something to do with the later occupation of the building after the fire, but it is very difficult to understand. We have now gridded out the N half of Space 71 and begun excavation through the floors. Mehmet began with Space 111 in the NE corner of Space 71 and has gone through fugitive lenses of floors onto more surfaces, with a possible human arm bone lying along the N face of wall 8 now. We have gridded Space 110 into 4 1 x 1 m squares and Serap has begun excavating the SW one of these. I am excavating the NE square, removing several layers of white plaster floor, with two in situ obsidian blades. The floors come down on to brown packing but in the S part of the 1 x 1 square the floors are underlain by intensely burnt deposits - directly in line with the burning evident on the bricks of the adjacent wall 7. This strongly supports our interpretation that after the destruction of the S part of the building by fire, Space 110 was rebuilt, extended and completely replastered. I also cleaned up the section of Pit 17, and was able to develop interpretation of the sequence of occupation. It is clear in the section that wall 18 is actually cut into earlier floors and that we have exposed these earlier floors on the S side of the building. On the N side of the building, however, we are still on upper floors. In other words, the building as we have it now exposed is at two phases. The reason for this is that the floors on the S side of the building are in fact the last, uppermost, floors of that side of the building and that after the fire this part of the building was not occupied again. The N side, as we already know, continued in occupation and more floors were laid - the uppermost of which we have now exposed. In order to get everything back in sync we simply need to excavate the upper floors of the N part of the building, reaching the next floors down, which we are the floors cut by wall 18, and this we are now doing. So the sequence is: i) occupation of entire building through several phases (yet to be enumerated and explored); ii) destruction of much of the building, especially its S half, by a fierce high-temperature fire; iii) general abandonment of S half of building and restructuring of occupation in N half of building which continues in use for the lifetime of several floors at least. This restructing may include the construction of wall 18 which is built to contain the burnt rubble to the S and is perhaps supported by a bank of dense fill to its immediate S to keep the burnt collapse in order. Alternatively. wall 18 may have been built before the fire but after the laying of the last floor in the S part of the building - but if so why is its S face not plastered? Internal walls are always plastered if possible. So, in Space 70 wall 15 may also have been a post-fire addition put in to contain rubble to the S and contemporary with the upper floors in the N part of Space 70 which we excavated last year. If this is so then the floors we have currently exposed in Space 70, generally heavily burnt, are contemporary with those in the S part of Space 71 and earlier than those now exposed in the N part of Space 71. Excavation of the floors in the N part of Space 71 is clearly the way ahead and should lead to having the entire building at one phase in due course.Entered By: Roger Matthews |
