Excavation of Workshop

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The excavations uncovered numerous structures including mud brick walls and furnaces, in addition to ceramics, coins, copper alloy debris, glass fragments, slags, ashes, corroded iron alloy fragments, charcoal and environmental remains such as animal bones and seeds.   The majority of remains were found in an area with a high concentration of crucible fragments and furnace debris, the so-called crucible pit.  Surface finds which were possibly related to iron processing, as they were magnetic, were also collected from adjacent piles of debris. 

The workshop and domestic area consist of various rooms and a courtyard. The courtyard is lined with fired bricks in a diamond pattern with a border. A wall separates the presumed domestic area and courtyard from the workshop. The workshop can be roughly divided into three areas.  The area of the crucible pit, the area of the furnaces, and an area separated from the other areas by an east-west running wall. The crucible pit was found in the north of the workshop. Next to an enclosed domestic room adjacent to the open courtyard, four furnaces were found and each was located with secondary structures, either a hut or a protective wall (Turner and Powell, forthcoming).  In the third area, a raised mud brick workbench was found. Some of the mud brick tiles exhibited an orange colour and friable top surface suggesting they were subjected to heat, presumably caused during metalworking. At the southeast corner of the bench, placed in a cut in the ground, was a ceramic vessel with the opening at what was the ground level during the use of the workshop. The original content and purpose of the vessel is unknown but it may have contained a substance needed during the metalworking process.

The proximity of the domestic dwellings to the industrial area, together with the relatively small number of furnaces and the quantity of industrial remains indicated a permanent workshop, possibly run by a family. There appears to have only been two phases of construction and the comparatively shallow depth of deposits suggest that the workshop was in use for less than a century and probably closer to fifty years.

© Anna Feuerbach Ph.D 2002                                                   moltenmuse@att.net