Daily Journal

Area D

Trench 8

E.O.

July 18, 2004

Today we began by fixing the tent so that it was more secure. Once this vital issue was dealt with we began the excavation portion of our day with loci 26 and 15. We spent the morning repeating a pattern of dig 5cm, sweep, look, and then dig again if there was no floor. In L26 we ran across a snag when we hit a pit of very soft ash. We followed this down and ended up with a hole approximately 50 cm deep. This hole, now L27, was not specifically a pit but appears to be fill up against wall L23.

In the rest of what had been L26 we hit floor in one section but had gone through it in the rest of the locus. L28 is the portion of floor that we had, and L29 is the sub floor area.

Brining the area west of L19 down did not clear up the issue of what L19 was. We held a conference with all the other excavators from area D and finally we decided that the only way to clear up the issue of what L19 is to cut a section through it. Because it was late in the day we decided that we should cut the section tomorrow. For the rest of the day we excavated the pit L30 which was an area in L24 which after extensive debate was determined to be a pit and is being excavated as such.