Daily Trench Journal

Area D

Trench 8

June 13, 2005

E.O.

Today we are planning to take more plan shots and so we are leaving L81, which we had planned to take out, in for the morning. The S-shaped rock feature which h is described yesterday is now L92. Because L92 is still partially covered by L81 we are not yet sure of the dimensions of this feature.

There is a floor under L78 that has been assigned L9. This floor has flat lying potsherds on it. It can also be distinguished by some ash, specifically in the southeast corner and yellowish clay. Other than these changes in soil and the sherds there is no way to distinguish the floor from other soil. We were also able to pull a carbon sample off of the floor from the south east corner near the ashy area. This carbon sample is KT # 2005 D.8.93.1.

Once L78 had been completely removed from the floor we took more plan shots of the trench. These plan shots will include the new course of L70 which was previously L87, The floor L93 and the completely exposed feature L81, which were not in the last one.

After the plan shots we removed L81. To do this we first picked off all the lithics and pottery and bagged it. The locus was mostly rocks, many of which appeared to be worked stone. We took the plastic bags full of stone and one bag that contained smaller flakes, including some obsidian. The pottery, which Bradley looked at briefly, seems to be mostly cookware. We took out one entire large bag of pottery and four bags of lithics. There are three bags of lithics that are all large pieces of stone (KT# 5, 7, 8). These bags are divided simply because of the volume of the material. I made a note in the KT remarks section to this effect for each of these KTs. Some of the stones look like cores which other stones were cut off though they themselves may not fit the traditional lithics description mold. I screened one bucket of soil. The bucket we screened was the loose soil, which had been between and directly under the rocks and pottery. We polled several potsherds and smaller lithics out of the screen. These went into their own KT bag (KT #9).

Bradley and I sprayed locus 91, which had been cleaned and swept, and finally the edge of the wall that connects 84 to 70. We started coming down on the outside of this and will try and come up against the wall later. For now I will keep this locus as 91 as we continue to go down though the size of the locus will have changed.

While this was going on I also had one guy open up the final piece of the eastern baulk. For now I had them simply bring it even with the top of wall L76 though I hope to have them go down in that area and come up against the other side of the wall.

By the end of the day L81 was not completely removed so we will do that tomorrow.