Tell Basta 2012 season begins

The Tell Basta Project    

The first two weeks of work at Tell Basta have been full of a variety of different activities. Work in two new gridsquares has started, already revealing promising structures. Remains of a massive mudbrick wall and a large floor came to light in X/4. The mud brick structures belong to the walls of the Late Period - Ptolemaic tower houses that were mentioned in the previous post. The floor is especially interesting. It consists of limestone chips, some as large as a fist, some crushed nearly to dust. The whole mixture makes a quite durable pavement. We hope in due course to determine whether this are was used for specialised activities which required a hard-wearing floor.

Y/5, the other gridsquare, shows the contexts of the adjacent square Y/4, excavated in the previous seasons. Here we discovered one small room containing a large quantity of figurines, mostly of terracotta but some made of limestone. Some of them showed the remains of their original plaster and paint.