August 2, 2001

As yesterday's sounding cutting didn't shine any new light on the wall situation in the trench, slightly more drastic measures were taken today, cutting L5045 (the southern mudbrick SW-NE wall) back to its two very clear mortar lines (which means there's a good chance we're cutting into outlying mudbricks) to see if we can figure out better the dimensions of the wall and, basically, what in the world is going on. In addition, the surrounding area was scraped once more.

Rather than getting an answer to the question, "Where does this wall go?" we rather got an answer to the question, "Why can't we figure out where this wall is going?" It now appears there is a large (circular, ~ 80 cm diameter) pit or oven immediately to the N of SW oven L5029 and probably cutting a fair portion of wall L5045, which I am leaning to thinking ends, or rather, corners, not too far into the trench and this new pit cuts the western portion whereas a large root path muddles interpretation of the east.

Meanwhile, now that all the old loci (related to previous features like floor L5034 in the north and whatnot) have been documented, I started hacking things down to try and get most of the trench (save soundings L5052, 5053 and NE and E portions of the trench which have been dug a little deeper) to the same level and extremely flat to see what has been missed. In most likelihood, I'll have to do some serious re-assignment of loci in the next couple of days. In any event, loci 5038, 5051, 5034 and 5044 were all chopped down today and though the work wasn't finished at shutdown time there are already some soil color/texture results appearing.

Finally, a second look was taken at NW pit L5047, and a good thing, too, because in one portion the ash pit continues down a meter, possibly more, containing extensive pottery and bones. However, the shape is very irregular with many strange undercuts of harder material (some due to roots) so I'm not completely sure what is happening there and hope to consult one of the directors tomorrow about it.

The first part of tomorrow will likely be spent finishing the scraping and cleaning job, followed by a spray down and some loci reassignment, other work pending on that.