Daily Trench Summary

Area D

Trench 8

June 22, 2005

E.O.

Today is my first day back in the field after being ill in the dig house for the past two days. Yesterday Barish Uzel excavated my trench on Bradley’s orders and so I spent the morning going over all the information, locus sheet, day plan etc from yesterday. One thing worth mentioning is that what I had thought was a floor abutting L.102 apparently was not. This area (now divided into three loci: 105, 107, 107) was taken down 10cm. Today we went down inside the cell rooms. This included loci 109, 110 and 111. All of these loci were taken down at least 5cm.

L. 109 was only a few cm deep. Almost immediately we began finding a white floor (L. 113) made of pseudo morphic organic remains. Two workmen were able to trace the floor up to the wall. This floor is very uneven, differing in elevation in some places by 20cm. Clearly this space was filled in by organic material rather than a surface that was constructed. It is therefore possibly that this is not a living space but a storage space. We were not able to articulate the entire area today. It is proving very hard to trace because the surface is so uneven. In places there is so much soil on top that the workmen are having to use small picks to get it off before they can go back to using trowels to trace it.

We found a few brick lines in L.112. It does not look as regular and even as the brick lines that were in L.100 yesterday. I took several photos of it but I do not think it was a surface or feature the way that the bricks in L.100 were. For now I am keeping this as fill and we will see what happens as we get further down in this locus.