Daily Trench Journal

Area D

Trench 8

June 9, 2005

E.O.

Today we continued to bring down all the fill loci. These include 78, 89, 87, 88 and 83. In locus 83 we had hit a skull on June 8th. Today we worked on articulating this brial to bring it out. We at first thought that the skull, which was the highest point of the burial and the first bones that we found, was positioned with the face down. The uppermost bones were very broken and so to articulate the skull we first went down inside and then around the outside of the skull. When we went down inside we found ridges inside the skull which indicated that it was the back of the head. This meant that the face had been up but was so broken that we were unable to identify it. The skull was found only 15 cm below topsoil which might explain why it is in such bad condition. We did find a portion of the jaw with teeth intact. It had full adult molars but the skull size was relatively small, certainly not the size of that of an adult human so i believe that the individual was approx 12 when they died We did not find a full skeleton, instead the only other bones we found were some long bones approx 10cm to the east of the skull. These bones extended into the brick of wall L70. We decided to carve out part of the brick they were stuck into to extract them. The bones extended several centimeters into the brick. The skull and a few long bones were all that we found.

Yesterday when we were bringing down locus 69 we found other bricks which changed the size of the locus. Along with a change in size the soil density changed to become more hard. These two facts made me decide to change loci. The area which was previously 69 is now 91.

When we were cleaning L88 we found another wall which runs parallel to and abuts the east baulk. i decided to make this wall a part of L70 since the walls are bonded. This means that L88 is surrounded on the west, east, and south by wall L70 with the northern baulk making the fourth side.