Daily Trench Journal

Area D

Trench 8

June 19, 2005

E.O.

Today we began by looking intensely at the exposed lines and trying to make decisions about where the walls were. For today we are mostly working in the northern section of the trench. In this area there are two levels, the result of how we excavated the previous phase. We believe that everything we are looking at is part of the same earlier structure despite the 15cm height difference in some areas of the trench.

The trench had been scraped yesterday and so this morning all we had to do was sweep and then spray. There are areas, especially in the lower sections of the trench, where the walls are very clear; however in some of the raised areas we have a lot of brick lines and no clear wall. This is specifically true in the northernmost raised section of the trench where we have a lot of bricks. One theory in this particular area is that an earlier room was filled in to make a flat platform to build the later house.

We decided that the best way to proceed was simply to go down in the areas which we were sure of while continuing to scrape the questionable areas.

I decided to take down the ‘for sure’ areas only a few cm. This was more to help with the ability to see the plan rather than to truly excavate these areas right now. In doing this I opened up locus 100 which was the first for sure inside space. We took this down a few cm and stopped. I also opened L.101 which was 20cm of fill against one of the walls. It was so small because the rest of it was blown out by the room above it. The only reason that we have this much of this room is that it is in a space where a row of bricks was in the later house. This locus was visible plaster against the wall and under that a layer of pseudo morphic organic remains. I did not give these different potential surfaces different loci because the space was so small. I did take a soil sample (L.101 KT 1) of the pseudo morphic layer. Under these two layers the soil was very dark, possibly ash.

I assigned a single locus to all of the connected walls: L.99. I defined this locus as all the walls with a single row of brick faced with plaster. As of now all the walls except one are in this locus. The one wall that is not in this locus is wall L.102. This is a two row wall which we have the corner of. This wall does not sit on the same matrix as the others and the corner is an odd position in relation to the other walls. The open spaced between L102 and L99 is not enough space to have been anything, even storage. I had the guys bring down the spaces between L99 and l102 just to help try and understand.

Along with this we took out walls L75, 76 and 77 and brought them even with the other flat areas of the trench. We pulled out some bags of pottery, lithics and bone as we did this. These items may have come from under the walls and we simply didn’t stop at the correct elevation. Otherwise it can be assumed that they were in the wall.

We did find one interesting thing in wall L76. With the bricks in the lowest course we found a large stone with a divot or indent in it, possibly a door post. I left this in situ since we had just caught the top of it. Possibly it was re-used for the foundation of the wall in which case it was not a door post for a door in that wall.