Archaeology Magazine - January/February 1984 - 44

The group next moved north to an undisturbed
area of the submerged city and established two
three-meter test units. This area yielded only a few
sherds of pottery, glass, lead weights, scraps of
leather, broken pipestems, and a few butchered animal bones. The only architectural features of note
were one large post which stood alone in the center
of the test area and a post hole in one corner. In
all probability, both features are the remains of
pilings for some pre-earthquake structure.
Hoping to discover more substantial architectural
features, the researchers moved further west into
deeper water before sinking a second test square
in four meters of water. An in situ brick floor was
found just centimeters below the seabed. The
overburden was stripped away with meticulous care
as the students followed the outside wall of the
structure. Next the excavation was extended to the
southwest and northeast outside the original
three-meter square in an effort to define the corners
of the building. Dive times were increased as the
pace of the work accelerated. On the last morning,
a small gap and a second foundation 15 centimeters away from the first was found. The next shift
of divers established that the wall footings and
brick patterns of this second foundation were
indeed different from those now called Building
One. How did this second structure relate to the
first? The team returned to Ttexas full of optimism
for what the next season's discoveries might hold.
The 1982 expedition members focused all their
efforts on the excavation of Building One, the main
structure located in 1981. After a few days of
excavation, it was established that the floors and
walls exposed during the last days of the previous year were all part of the same structure. Large
sections of the flooring were covered with the
debris of collapsed walls. In the long run this proved
to be most fortuitous, for trapped beneath the
jumbled bricks lay quantities of well-preserved artifacts and architectural details. As work progressed
it became evident that the floors and walls belonged
to a large multi-roomed structure, probably a
rowhouse. By the end of the season the team had
shifted the centuries of overburden from an area
of over 300 square meters, revealing enough architectural detail to predict the overall size and orientation of the building. There were at least six
rooms on the ground level and enough fallen brick
to indicate that there may have been an upper
story.
Both of the excavated rooms appear to have
been 5.4 meters wide and around 7.3 meters long.
The length is only an approximation as the floor
and walls at the southern end of the building are
broken and jumbled as they slope downward at
a pronounced angle. The architectural evidence suggests that the three northern rooms were constructed first and occupied for a period of time prior
to the addition of the southern rooms which are
constructed over a large amount of seventeenthcentury trash. Each of these northern rooms is
connected to the room immediately to the south
by means of a door in the southeast corner of the
44

ARCHAEOLOGY

Floating on the surface looking down onto the excavation,
one can see the brick floors and the intersecting walls
forming the four interior corners of four of the six rooms
in Building One. Rooms 4 and 2 are to the right with
an in situ doorsill exposed in the doorway in the wall
between them . Rooms 6 and 5 are to the left.

common wall. Two wooden doorsills in fact were
still in situ between Rooms 1 and 3 and Rooms 2
and 4 when the divers removed the overburden.
Interestingly, the northern rooms of the structure differ from the later southern additions. The
brick floor patterns of the northern rooms are laid
out diagonally to the walls in a herringbone pattern, the elevation of the floors is noticeably higher,
and the interior walls have been plastered and
whitewashed. None of the walls of the southern rooms
are bonded or joined to the crosswall shared by
the north and south rooms. This wall, with its welldefined stepped wall footing, has the appearance
of an outside wall, supporting the view that the
southern half of the building was constructed at
a later date. In fact, it was discovered that there
were two floor levels in each of the southern rooms,
separated by an inch or more of artifact-laden fill.
With the high water table in the town the original

Archaeology Magazine - January/February 1984

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Archaeology Magazine - January/February 1984