Daily Journal

Area D

Trench 8

July 8, 2004

Thursday July 8th. We began by looking at the section created by L3 to see if the floor continued into that Locus. It was there but did not seem to be very well preserved. We changed L3 to L10 to preserve any context for the floor and then went down by 5 cm increments. When we did not find the other floor there we decided to simply ‘wack it’ down to the level of floor L9. L7 was changed to L11 to preserve context for the floor in the south part of the trench. We are not finding much pottery in either L10 of L11. We also took L5 down 10 more cm. We dug around a large rock that was there and are waiting to see if it is sitting on something. We also found some teeth, possibly sheep (they are too small to be donkey) in L5. L10 and L11 were both taken down to the level of L9 so they will be closed, L9 and the bottom of L10 and L11 form a platform which is 20 cm above the bottom of L5. The floor is still not completely uncovered so we are not sure exactly where it goes. This means that the men cannot continue to dig that area until we know exactly where the floor is. An important point to the dating of L9 is that L10 and L11 are the context loci. L6, which is how we found L9, is useless as a context because it is so totally mixed with the things that were in the pit or wash which was the main L6 elements. The problem with L10 and L11 is that the floor (the part which is currently uncovered) is only in a 1m area disappearing into the West balk. Loci 10 and 11 covered considerably larger areas extending out further towards the slope of the hill. For example L10 extends 2.75m from the W balk and abuts L5 which is a topsoil Locus. Therefore the pottery from L10 is not a perfect context and could be mixed with things that were right above the floor to things that had fallen down from other areas and were in the topsoil.