July 26, 2001

Time to hack stuff out. The central mudbrick/hyper-packed dirt feature was horribly pedestled so we hacked it out today (L5031). Some pieces came off like nice mudbricks, though much of it just appeared to be extremely hard material which previously had a clear separation from the surrounding areas of the trench. One of my works mentioned earlier that the material may have been a more crude form of mud construction, a method he says is still in use today. I think he might be right in this case. In any event, most of the trench is now level with that dominating central feature gone. On the next day of digging we will have to scrape the picked surface flat to try and find the walls we are trying to follow (i.e. L5039, which makes the E-edge of N surface L5034).

Speaking of which, the top of a new mudbrick wall was encountered today as we were cleaning the portion of L5027 against the S baulk. It had two very clear bricks and the line of the wall could be followed a couple meters to the NE, where it becomes unclear. At the moment the wall, L5045, may have one or two courses.

Trying to determine the nature of the N surface and walls surrounding it (L5034, 5037, 5039) took an interesting turn today as we dug through the perennial vacant area L5021, abutting the N edge of the surface and suspected to be the degraded continuation of mudbrick wall L5037, which it absolutely was not. The soil was soft and loose and concealed a rock feature (L5046) which continues N into the baulk. Meanwhile, another large brick of L5037 was uncovered which leads me to believe the wall either did not continue past its current extent to the SW, or that it is actually a SW-NE wall. Also of note is that the ashy area originally thought to be part of surface L5034, in its NW corner is not what was suspected either. I was playing around with it today and found out it actually is an ash layer which goes completely under the surface (also notable in the small section between L5021 and L5034). This also makes me suspect of the W surface area I had originally attributed to L5034 as it was under an ash layer and may be a separate feature. This ash layer is not seen on the E edge of L5039, which leads me to suspect the wall is good (though could possibly mean we simply haven't reached the surface edge yet and the wall is fictitious, though I don't believe that is the case).

Finally, the bottom of another oven was discovered during the excavation of said E edge of L5039. Circular with a nice pottery lining, it is a shame we didn't catch it earlier. However, is does lead to a group of 3 small pottery lined circular ovens with the same bottom level within a radius of about a meter. What this means I'm not entirely sure, but at the moment I'm thinking they're related to each other, and either surface L5034, 5027, 5028, or 5025.