BACH1 AREA EXCAVATIONS
RUTH TRINGHAM AND MIRJANA STEVANOVIC
Work commenced on 5 June 2002, and ended on 15 July 2002. The primary aim of the season was to finish excavation of Building 3 and to continue the excavation of the small rooms known as Spaces 87,88,89.
Figure 13: Aerial photograph of Building 3 in Phase 1 (north is towards the right of the picture).
Building 3 - During the 2002 season excavation of Building 3 we completed removal of the floors and features belonging to Phase 1 of occupation down to the midden below the building. This was followed by scraping the plaster layers from the wall faces and detailed recording and description of the wall bricks and mortars.
At the beginning of the 2002 season we completed excavation of floors belonging to phases 2-3 showing that these areas had been the location of food preparation and storage throughout the building’s history. The excavation of the earliest phase of the house (Phase 1) provided evidence that house floors were renewed less frequently than in the later phases and made of different clays. Several features of Phase 1 were built directly on the underlying midden prior to the very first house floor. They comprise two ovens, the roof-entrance bench into the house in the southeast corner of Building 3, a bench that separates the roof-entrance area from the “clean” northern and eastern parts of the house, and the six posts alongside the peripheral walls. A foundation deposit of obsidian bifacial points was unearthed near the entrance-bench.
The walls and floors of Building 3 were built directly on the midden and incorporated its existing topography. After the completion of excavation of the earliest floors in Building 3, the wall plasters on all four perimeter walls were scraped revealing the surprising existence of an opening in the northern part of the East wall. It was also clear that the bricks and mortars used in the construction of the walls varied according to their height above the midden.
The excavation of Spaces 89, 88, 87 - The 2002 excavation of the small spaces produced interesting results, especially on clarifying the relationship between Building 3 and the small rooms. Their excavation will be completed in 2003. Currently we consider that the three rooms were all built after the construction of Building 3 but that they were at least partially contemporary with the occupation of Building 3 and the building(s) to their south (Spaces 95 and 99).
An alternative interpretation suggests that the three small rooms (Spaces 87, 88, and 89) were originally part of a larger house(s), represented by Spaces 95 and 99, which later were divided into smaller rooms that were assigned specific functions.
The excavation of Space 87 produced a surprisingly large number (at least 9) of burials for such a small room (Fig. 14). A beautiful two-piece bone buckle was associated with a disturbed skeleton at the top of this group (Fig. 15). The East and South walls are both painted.
Figure 14: Some of the burials in Space 87
Figure 15: Bone buckle found in Space 87 in the Bach area