August 14, 2000

We start by straightening the edges of the Southeast corner. This gets it's own pottery bag. We at the same time are moving North in our L1045 probe to find the edge of the L1046 mud-bricks. This brings us up to Elvan's street (L1043).

Next I will level L1044 in what appears to be a futile effort to find bricks there, or anything of note. The greatest hope for this area remains the Southeast corner where it seems 2 bricks have appeared just cutting the corner. I am unable to find any symmetry in our probe into L1045, though most of the dirt is pretty solid. It might all be collapse. We have swept L1044. In the Northeast near the baulk between L1036, L1033 there is definitly an ash pit, a donut and some smashed pottery and pebbles, perhaps it is a kitchen.

To see about finding something in L1045, we dropped another 15cm. We swept L1044 and are trying to see something there. There may be a line running from the edge of L1042 to the edge of L1043. This would be constitant with our big pit theory. The pit theory is that people later dug a hole on our south baulk down quite far and took all the big rocks. Perhaps it was my original well theory. We will look for lines in the baulk. It seems we have never found anything where L1009 and now L1044 are. There are big chuns coming up in L1044, so maybe we are cutting through brick.

Around breakfast we dropped L1044 and squared off cell corners. The same was of L1045, which we had dropped an additional 15cm. Also we are cappadocing L1036 to see if there is anything underneath. If not, the stones can be removed.

Well we found a great little glass or rock crystal blade North of L1036 on the East baulk. We also cleared under L1033 to a small extent. In the North, just west of L1039 we dropped 10cm to see if there was anything in L1045. Finally we removed the collapse on the West side of L1043.