07/04-07/15 2002

C2

"Weekly" Journal Summary

Because I have been subjected to a bad stomach in this period this is the first summary.

The first project to was the cleaning and generally making the trench ready for excavation. This meant a lot of cleaning loci.

This also meant we could go down a bit to see if there were more courses stone in the two foundation walls, described later. This was how ever not the case, so we carried on to the main objective of the period was the removal of the two stone foundations that had been dominating the trench for almost two seasons. The walls were renamed from L2048 to L2116 and from L2088 to L2117.

The largest one L2116 was removed as L2114 and L2120. The excavation of the sub wall fill, L2115, revealed that the foundation wall had been build on top of a mudbrick structure of some sort on the western side of the wall L2116. As we traced the mudbrick area it became clear that the area, L2122, encompassed two small pits identified last year, now relabeled from L2078 to L2123 and from L2100 to L2124. It became clear that the pits were centers of circular patterns of mudbrick. These mudbrick are trapezoid in shape.

The two pits, L2123 and L2124 were almost identical in every aspect. Both had a plaster topping, lined with potsherds, and filled with burned material (dirt) and many small potsherds.

The two pits and the circular structure around them only raise one question: What is it?

The other wall was removed as L2120, and the sub wall soil was removed as L2121.

Along the east baulk and in the southeast corner are two pits, one of them were fully excavated as L2128, but did not produce anything significant. The other, L2118, has not been fully explored as of yet.

Lastly we straigthed the south baulk, as it collapsed in 2001, it took two cleaning loci, L2127 and L2129 to do the job.