| Entry: | A very cold Monday night, and in Tuesday morning I was not feeling very well. I had to leave most of the work to Tania, Yiannis and Nikos. Good progress was made. They tried to finish the NW area of the trench where the collapsed plaster had been found on the 8th and 9th. We moved towards the South wall (Feature 103) by taking Unit 1720. Under only few centimetres of deposit a white plastered surface was uncovered, extending up to the hearth or oven (Feature 111). The white plaster is very weathered, presumably due to its proximity to the surface. It must be a floor, but its relation with the floor found on Monday (Unit 1717) is still unclear. I suspect the latter is an earlier feature, but the evidence is not yet conclusive. Nikos and Tania are working in the North part of the trench trying to clear up the walls which close Building 10 from the North. The continuation of Wall 102 (N-S) was found, but no trace of the E-W wall. After removing traces of white plastered floor (Feature 110) Tania and Nikos are struggling through mixed fill, heavily disturbed by animal burrows. At the end of the day we decided to remove the fallen plaster in the middle of the trench. We did so after photographing and drawing the feature. The next day (Wednesday 11th) work was resumed on the Eastern part of the trench. The aim here was to go down, removing the fill and reaching the floor levels which were exposed yesterday and day before yesterday on the West part of the trench. We started by removing the "bench" (Feature 106) which was abutting wall 102 and was largely cut by pit 102. The bench was again a mudbrick construction, but it cleaved well from the wall which was running behind it. The traces of floor found next to the bench in Unit 1715 were also removed. These two features should represent the last phase of Building 10, and they are distinct from the two floors mentionned earlier. They are related however to the hearth (111), as a small trace of floor surviving right next to it shows. After this phase, this part of building 10 was covered by the floor 110 which covered also wall 102, indicating that building 10, or at least part of it was no longer in use. The cutting of the pit 102 followed, as shown by the abundant pieces of plaster included in its fill, presumably coming from the floor. On the Northern part, things are gradually clearing up. An E-W wall was found, but not in line with the wide double wall 105 running E-W from the NW corner of building 10. Its stratigraphic relations to the rest of the feature is not yet clear, and we will attempt to clarify this tomorrow. The floor 110 however, covered also this wall. We discussed some issues of the excavation system in the evening seminar.Entered By: Kostas Kotsakis |
