August 14, 2001

As I was checking out the section on L 9013 it became clear that the gray/brown soil left in that part of the trench (south of the sounding) stopped after about 15 cm and became more red/brown. I decided to take down the last 1.52m by 15cm as L 9014. My hope is that I can systematically get down to the level of the red dirt we found yesterday (that looks bricky) and then follow it in the hopes of finding a wall.

I also had a guy in the sounding digging in the soft central area which is coming up with ash but also some red clay. Andy doesn't remember there being any clay in it last year. This contamination makes sense as we are still finding some garbage.  No artifacts except half of a rusty choppa head left in there from last year. Will the garbage never end?

We sprayed down the trench after we had removed, I think, all of L 9014. I haven't closed the locus yet. I still need to test the soil. The problem when we sprayed the trench was that this north east area that we need to look at gets strange light in the afternoon from the blue and green tents. We're going to come out and look later this afternoon/evening.

The northeast corner of the sounding itself where bricks came up also has some nice stuff in the baulk that is right on top of the area. It looks like there may have been a wall and then some bricks slumped over. This makes sense since we may have picked up some bricks in other areas of the sounding. Some more reddish/orangeish areas have popped up. We're troweling the area looking for lines and to see if we can get part of a curving oven. Some of the bricks are protruding in the middle of the west sounding wall about 80cm from the north baulk. I'm just hoping to connect them with the ones in the northeast. The whole oven theory could work. The north baulk, in addition to the slump, has the concave layers of ash that look a lot like the ash deposition in the oven ( L 4023 and L 4027) of F-4.

There also seems to be one brick in the soft earth in the sounding 5cm from the west baulk and the center north to south (80 cm roughly) close to where the bricks from the hoped for oven wall are. It, however, is running north to south while the others run east to west.