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Geoffrey & Françoise
Summers |
Huge effort was expended on levelling out-crops of bed-rock, terracing and infilling. This modification of the landscape to meet the needs of urban construction, buildings, streets and the laying of large evenly paved external areas was continuous throughout the brief life of the city. Walls were either founded on bed-rock or on solid rubble fill, and the same apparently holds true for floors and pavements. There appear to have been changes in building methods during the life of the city. The earliest walls tended to have base courses of large stones set on edge along one or both faces. Later buildings do not exhibit this feature, either because it was inherently unstable or because of the diminishing prevalence of large stones. Later still, deep foundations, wider than the walls that they supported, were laid. Some walls were built of stone to a considerable height, probably to the roof, others were only one stone course above the level of the highest floor or surface, above which they carried timber framed mud-brick construction. This latter kind of footing often survives to its original height, indicated by a topmost levelling layer of small, flat, stones on which timber beams rested. All walls were built, in so far as the uncut granitic stone allowed, in level courses and chinked. Mud-bricks were large, thick and rectangular (32 x 26 x 10-12 cm), wall faces were coated with thick mud plaster. Generally external surfaces within the urban blocks had well laid stone pavements and drains, both a necessity on a mountain-top subject to violent rain, hail storms and heavy snow fall. Most buildings appear to have been single storey, reflecting the abundance of space. Nothing was recovered from the fallen debris to indicate the use of roofs as activity areas, not surprisingly given the frequency of high wind and storms
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