August 16, 2001

Today we pushed to try and expose as much of the wall 3037 as possible before the season ends. We want to see if there really is a clear connection with the stones lying in series from the south to north baulk which would make a 10 m wall.

We started by digging from the surface that we found under the pit L3043, west of the 10 m N-S stone wall, which was partially dug into by the worker digging the pit. This is a cobble surface, L3055, similar to the ones found in other parts if the trench. We followed it towards the wall of the oven L3030 in order to see if we could find the surface that was associated with the oven before we took it out to look for the wall. we found that some rocks maybe from the wall stop the cobble surface. Looking closer at the oven it is clearly founded on the wall as some of the rocks from the wall come up through the fills of the oven. We then began to dig the 3-5 cm that we left around the wall of the oven in order to protect it. This is L3053 which is a mixed locus of all the loci between the oven wall and L3038. While digging this locus we found that a scorch mark on the wall came down into a surface that was preserved in this section. This was locus 3027, the broken cobble surface which the oven in the south, L3006, was founded. This means that both ovens were in use on the same surface. After finding this we found no more connections so we photographed the oven and started taking it out. After the oven was taken out we could see that there were a large group of rocks lying in the same line as the wall L3037. There is a break between the two groups of rocks but that seems right because the presence of the pit to the SW of the oven and the founding of the oven itself most likely removed the stones at this level.

At the same time we dug down in the two loci which are the fill above the wall L3039 and L3052. We found more stones that are in the same line as the wall. The stones of this wall L3037 seem to logically flow in a N-S line from the south baulk to the north baulk. Although the rock groupings in this line are not connected in a couple of places they look to go together in 10 m long wall. The places which don't have stones present either have a reasonable explanation why they are not there or there hasn't been enough soil to be removed to be able to see the wall completely. For instance we noticed a couple of stones to the west of the north part of the fill above the wall L3052 which makes me believe this locus is wider than I had originally thought. Unfortunately we are out of time for the season. We will have to wait until next season to find what happens to the wall.