July 24, 2001

I came back to find my baulk chopped up. But also the floor had settled from digging L1065 awhile ago. In L1065 the 10 cm bricks of last year seem to have made an appearance pretty far into the trench (at its new size). I see 2 potential rows. Also in the very middle of the trench of the south end of L1059, where a lot of the L1061 stuff was, we seem to have cut into 2 large bricks which may be a wall continuing Southward under L1061. It appears that they may be related, as the L1061 stuff doesn't exist in the East. Instead the L1062 and L0163 pits which cut L1064 show that there may have been a surface at that level at the top of the wall in the sense that some ash was put there behind the wall.  That is, there is a small chance that the wall caught the uphill fill and there were later ashy pits put there.

Last year we had a long L1043 Elvan Street line of rocks with 5 rows and 1 course. We then had L1061 stuff under those rocks. Now it seems that we have the mud brick in a direct line associated with that. I.E. those rocks may have been the top of this mud brick. These mud bricks seem to stop at the same place to the south as last year's rocks were cut. The L1046 bricks on the west of the trench may have been parallel to L1043 and may have been at a related elevation to the "top" of the mud brick under L1061.

However, now the rocks on the East baulk, L1055, seem to be at higher elevations and a different construction. So what I don't know is how L1039, L1036, L1033, L1049, and now L1055 and L1058 are all related to each other. The most troubling is the L1049/L1058 relationship with everything north of them. L1049/L1058 do not seem to be either parallel or perpendicular to the middle L1061/L1043 or the northeast L1055 and associated last year's loci.

So today's exploration is in L1055 under the baulk cut both to clean and to make sense of the rocks on the East baulk. We started from the north. The soil is both soft and hard in the very corner. There was some sort of pit in that corner last year and it may continue. To the south of that I found some green slag in the wall called KT1532. Now there is possibly a very beautiful surface here coming up which I somewhat contained by the L1055 and L1036 locus rocks.

Now from the baulk cut it seems there was a 20 cm or so layer of more reddish dirt on this surface and then a flat layer of stuff laid on that. In the southeast corner the whole thing gets very confusing.