| Entry: | Start of another week on site after a Friday trip to Ivriz and Meke Golu. It has been a very windy day with dust blowing through the tent and into our faces and hair. It is still blowy now but no sign of rain. Excavation proceeds well. Space 70 is not far from finished now. We have the floor and sub-floor packing out throughout except for a thin N-S baulk in the middle and one or two other small areas. Serap finished exposing the plaster lined basin, feature 34, in Space 70 and is now taking out the plaster itself. This plaster has been laid into a cut made into the ashy spread underlying all the floors. Presumably it is a facility for containing liquids, perhaps water, or some semi-liquid material. I completed the removal of FI 11 - good to see it go as it has been there since we first started work on the house last year. There was a nice white plaster floor underneath and on the adjacent wall faces, with traces of bright red paint, so the oven was not part of the original design of the house. Wendy spent all day drawing and taking blocks from baulks and working sections in Space 70. She has some great samples and is certainly making a lot of sense of the deposits. We still have some way to go in Spaces 70 and 110 but I am sure we can do it. Louise has cleared the plaster off the top of 2 quadrants of platform 13, exposing burial cuts and is now taking upper fill out of one main cut, removing scattered human bones. She now has an intact child's lower jaw and I am certain there will be many individuals buried under this platform. The burials will be the major preoccupation over the next 2 weeks. Tona and Jenis continued excavating burial 30 to the E of platform 13. They have now uncovered the complete skeleton of a very small child, possibly newly born, lying in the same position as the adult beside it. The child's skeleton had got covered by the bones of other bodies which had been redeposited, but is now clear. So the latest interments in this spread of bodies may well be mother and child, but we'll see. Adnan removed floors and packing in the central part of Space 71, bringing it all down to the ash. Mehmet excavated the central part of the lentil bin and underlying floors. Gavin is working in the SE part of Space 71, taking out the remaining floors. As he cleared against the wall face of wall 6 to the E of the lentil bin he exposed the brickwork and it is now clear that there is a break in the wall which has been filled with another type of brick. This break has a heavily burnt surface - it is either a blocked niche or a blocked access into the building itself, both of which are exciting possibilities. If the latter, then the adjacent building to the S must be later than Building 1.Entered By: Roger Matthews |
