Daily Trench Journal

Area F

Trench 21

June 9, 2005

J. Nijhowne

We began the day by taking levels for locus 5. We are part way through the locus. We did a second large pick pass, took levels again and photographed the bottom of locus 5. At this point, one of the workers pointed out a spot in the middle of the trench that seemed to be filled with sand. It was much softer and looser than the surrounding matrix. We outlined the area of softness and it seemed to be a large round pit. Its diameter is approximately 1.10 meters. I designated it locus 6. We defined the edge by troweling from the harder matrix towards the soft center. The edges were quite well defined.

We removed the first 10 cm or so with trowels. Even small picks weren’t necessary. Then we took our first soil sample KT 5. We also screened 1 bucket of dirt through the large meshed screen to see if we were missing anything. We weren’t. At this point we started coming down on some very large sherds that all appeared to be part of the same vessel. A large rim sherd lay vertically against the east profile of the pit. We removed the sherds as we went down. We set these sherds to be cataloged as a separate KT which is now KT6. As we went down, we had to excavate by lying on our stomachs and reaching into the pit so we didn’t crush anything.

As the pit narrowed towards the bottom, we started coming across bone fragments. As a pot burial was a possibility, we were on the look out for them. Still, some of the very first bone fragments were added to the animal bag bone. This bag, KT2, was set aside with the human bone because it likely contains a few fragments of the skeleton. At this point, we quit throwing out the matrix. Because it was the very end of the day, we collected what bones we could including one tooth and wrapped them in foil. We covered the matrix with sacks so we could bring out the fine screens after the weekend.