| Entry: | Start at 6 o'cock, with the full team, later the workmen hd to help set up the tent. Warm, windy, agreeable conditions.
In A, Christop and Necat dug down into the apparently still quite mixed and eroded slope continuing unit 13703. Here and there patches of the hard surface we are looking for and have already exposed in B and the W half of B appear, but in some places there seems to be another, slightly softer surface overlying the lower one, separated by yet another layer of soft earth. Do we have two surfaces with respective soil horizons here? In the S part of 13703, the stones in the vicinity of the scatter of infant bones we encountered yesterday urned out to be a E-W oriented grave lined by limestones. We allocated feature number 2400, with unit 13704 for the fill an 13706 for the stones. However, digging down the fill by Nick yielded no finds and it appeared to be the same loose soil as the surroundings. The stones seem to be set into the upper one of the hardish surfaces, and unlike the other skeleton (13705), follow the slope.
Skeleton 13705, facing east-west, was exposed from the feet up to the apparently crossed arms today by Nisha. It is extremely well-preserved, unlike skeleton 13702 in B, and also the supine position and the orientation point to a christian date. No cut or fill is visisble yet, but the almost horizontal bedding indicates that this grave has been dug into one of the mound's old surfaces.
Around those features, the lose ashy soil patches are still visible here, as well as the one in the N. The apparently huge pit with brown soft soil is still visible and extends into the profile.
In A, units 137801 (NW corner) and 137803 (SW corner) were used to clean the visible features here. In the SW corner, I am quite confident that Daviod and Helen cleaned a set of Early Chalcolithic structures here: skeleton 13802 is a right-side hocker, but its lumbal spine column, pelvis and femora have been distroyed by a pit (13804). The plaster floor seems to have once covered the skeleton, and no cut is visible either. It is resting on a hard grey gritty surface, that close to the W profile also underlies the plaster floor. There's one mudbrick lying on that surface in the SW corner, maybe rubble that preserved the plaster floor here, since we cannot trace it further east (yet - hopefully).
In the NW corner, a mudbrick wall with single bicks discernible by colour runs parallel to the N profile. It has some plaster leayers on its S-facing surface. In the very corner, something like a little space is delineted by another course of bricks. Tomorrow, we'll try to trace it further east.
Cleaning work close to the W profile and around the stones did not reveal their true nature yet.Entered By: ER |
