Daily Trench Journal

Area D

Trench 8

June 1, 2005

E.o.

Today our main concern was to figure out what was going on with the brick area in the southern section. To so this we scraped it for the second time, paying special attention to areas where any identification was problematic. Almost the entire day was taken up with scraping sections of the trench flat. When Bekir came by he also pointed out that there were sections of the baulk that were not straight and that it could be very problematic to draw the baulk, plus it was just sloppy archaeology. To remedy this we discussed several areas, which I could have the guys work on if I were waiting for him to come up and help me.

Through a blessed act of god right after I had finished scraping and cleaning the trench is started raining. The tent was down and so the trench got a complete dosing. This was amazing because as soon as it stopped we were able to see lines of walls that we had not seen before and what was there was much more clear. I got into the trench barefoot and places nails in the corners of the walls that Bekir and Lynn could identify when standing on the baulk. Later Bekir came back and helped me try and work out which walls went with each other. We were able to positively connect the few free standing bricks against he baulk with wall L56 because we can see the lines of one of the courses of bricks. It appears that wall L65 is not a four-course wall but possibly a wall with a building butting up against it. There is an almost complete square building with its west wall abutting L65. The northern wall of this building is blown out by pit L58. The brick area in the southern section now appears to be a building also. We are able to see three walls. Both the side walls (which run north south) disappear into the baulks and the southern wall is not visible in the trench at all.