| Entry: | We have been blown off site this afternoon, with no work possible after lunch. There is a terrific wind blowing from the west and filling our shelter with dust. We tried to tie down the canvas sides but that just put all the strain on the wooden frame which looked ready to give so we untied the sides and let them blow in the wind. The building is now deep in dust and from where I sit I can see the whole array flapping and cracking like an abandoned schooner on a high sea. A new shelter has arrived in Konya and should be delivered here next week. We certainly need a much smarter arrangement than the one we have now, but I hope it can stand up to the strong winds. This morning we continued with the removal of wall 18 getting it down to its lowermost course of bricks which are set into a cut through the floors. The grey bricks showed up clearly set in an orange mortar. There is a distinctive bend in the wall line at its E end where it abuts the earlier wall 9. This kink seems deliberately to avoid the collapsed bucranium, feature 19, but that may be fortuitous. Adnan has now planned the bricks and we will remove them from their cut as soon as we can. Gavin did various tidying up jobs and then began the excavation of wall 9 and the late extension of wall 10, pulling the laid bricks directly off the burnt collapsed material of the earlier phase. I excavated the last remaining sections of white floors from Space 110, exposing the entire cut for the presumed burial in the centre of the room. We now have the earlier edge of the space delineated well to the E of its later limit in the form of wall 9. It seems like the earlier version of this space was a platform rather than a small room and we have the truncated plaster and make-up layers visible under the uppermost white floors. So, after the abandonment of the S side of the building, after the fire, extra space was created by converting a platform into a small room. But the platform was always quite substantial, with thick walls (8 and 10) in its earliest phase. Louise continued removing the upper floors around feature 26. We now have a low ledge running along the S face of wall 5, all along the N side of Space 71. Nurcan worked for the day helping Engin remove more extra-mural deposits to the W of the building. Quite a few people are taking their mid-season break this weekend, so we will be severely depleted next week until Monday. I think we will have Engin, Serap, Adnan and myself. We have such a lot to do and at my back I always hear time's winged chariot.Entered By: Roger Matthews |
