August 13, 2001

Today we decided to take a little more drastic approach to the trench. First I closed L 9009. The soil has moved from the grayish brown to a more true brown. Also there are not the chunks of brick and hard earth present anymore. This area became L 9012 and L 9013 and L yet to be named.

With this new area christened I enacted the new plan. We can see in the sounding that nothing is coming at least for a meter on the south sounding wall. So we decided to take the first (northern most) 50cm of L 9012 and push it down 50cm. This would then give us a section on the rest of the area of L 9013 and more on L 9008. If nothing comes up in the section we'll go another 50cm over and 50cm down and take out L 9013. If there's something in the section there then at least I won't have a big dirt box and I'll deal with it as I need to.

I didn't see anything in the sounding/mini baulk of L 9012. I took several photos of its position and closeups of the sounding wall itself. I decided to proceed with the plan to move on another 50cm. I made the second 50cm L 9013. This way the KT bags are separate as are the loci. I swear I munselled both loci and they really did come out the same 10 YR 4/3 Brown. L 9013 has a few more little root hairs in it than L 9012 did.

About 28 cm down in L 9013 we came on a hard reddish area right next to the east baulk. It could be some bricks.  I decided to get a section on them so I cut about half of the step. I was going to make it level but as we started cutting it down about 10cm lower some very vivid black ash popped up. We stopped and flattened the area. Tomorrow we will push back and see if we can figure out what it is.