August 3, 2001

First thing in the morning today we cleaned the entire upper area with fine brushes in order to try to define a pit line that we thought we saw yesterday. We were unable to find a pit line and I believe that is because this is a fill locus so there is a little randomness allowed. I investigated the oven, L3003, and the surface L3027 to see if the oven was put on the surface. While working with the oven with a couple of my workers, they told me that some vital things about ovens. First, the ground around the base of the oven will be softer than the surrounding surface and it will be a little ashy because of the fire in the oven. Second, it is a common practice in the area to put wet dirt against the oven above the surface that it was put onto. This makes a slanting surface starting thin near the middle/top of the oven and thickening as it gets closer to the associated surface and stopping at its thickest point on top of the associated surface. This is incredibly useful information because it tells me what to look for in the section. I should be looking for the edge of the oven wall, from there sloping away from the oven would be a layer of compacted dirt and at is bottom a soft ashy surface continuing away from the oven into whatever surface is associated with it. This will point out the surface. In the section i found that the surface that this oven is sitting on is the cobble surface L3027. After finding and documenting the surface we took out the oven and L3027.

In the middle of the fill layer L3034 saw some cobbles and I was not sure if they were a surfacing or if it was a pit or what. After examining the cobbles closely and the surrounding area I decided that it was the top of the stone wall coming up in the south of L3034. I named it L3037.

We next dug the rest of the fill, L3032, inside the orangeish oven feature, L3030. We revealed a surface underneath the fill that has a nice potsmash in the NE corner. This is L3036. It seems to be a white plaster surface that extends covers the entire area inside the oven feature.

Looking at the section of the pit we can see that the pit extends at least 10 cm above it's current level cutting L3027 and the previous loci above it. L 3013 is not contaminated by this however because it was separated by the feature L3015 and L3027 was not contaminated because we dug the pit before the locus.

Finally we finished articulating the wall L3005 and everyone is content we my original analysis that the E stones are not part of the wall as they are now pedestaled something like 20 cm. The plus side is one of the workers found a small stone animal figurine while digging KT3304. After I take a picture tomorrow I will remove those stones.