F1JP08192002

Daily Trench Journal

Area F, Trench 1

August 19, 2002

Work this day focused on closing the trench. This is the end, my only friend the end. We had the goal to remove the large pot from the trench this morning in one complete piece. We were able to accomplish this feat by wrapping the entire pot in tin foil and tying string around it.

Removing the pot was accomplished by the addition of a one meter by one meter locus, added to the trench for the express purpose of removing the storage jar before the season ended for this trench, namely today. We ended up digging down around the area for about 10 cm. The name of the new recovery locus, recovery since it was an arbitrary locus division, was L1103. We actually ended up pedestaling the pot by 3 cm when we had dug down. The soil was a soft fill for the entire time we were digging down in this area. As stated before we wanted to remove the storage jar in one complete piece and we did so by wrapping it in sturdy American-made aluminum foil and then tying string around the aluminum foil to secure the pot. And thus concluded this part of our trench. The pot was finally KT’d as KT5 in L1103, although it should be remembered that this pot appeared to be buried in the surface of L1098, the hard packed clay surface. This means that although it was KT’d in the other locus it is probably more closely related to where the jar’s lid is, and not where its bottom is.

We also wanted to figure out whether or not our two walls continued that we still have in the trench. We cut back to the wall lines and cut very straight on L1069, the wall in the SE corner of the trench and it appears that the wall continues, so we left it there. While we cut off back to the wall line in L1069 we found a spindle whorl (KT10) which we small found.

Lastly, we dealt with L1096, the wall in the NE of the trench. It appeared, after sectioning and cutting the sides of the wall very straight, that the wall was contemporary with L1098, the surface that had ended a couple of days ago, but that just below there the reddish mudbricky color ended and it appeared the wall also ended. We believed this to be the case because of the discovery of a huge rock that seemed to go underneath the wall. We removed the wall and fully uncovered the rock, a large 50 cm x 30 cm flat rock. Then, pushing farther to the W to remove the wall we found a cobble surface underneath the wall. The cobbles are new surface L1104. The rocks of this surface are larger than the cobbles of other surfaces in my trench. Most of these cobbles are 10 cm or even longer in length. This new locus was about 1.6 meters long from the N baulk and about .7 meters wide.  This looks very interesting, but we are done. At least it will be fun for someone to excavate next year.

My trench turned into a bunch of squares over the past two days, with areas being half excavated or being new arbitrary loci. Oh well. After working on these three areas we took many measurements for a final top plan, as well as measured everything in the trench and then took many photos.

And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make!

CM