Daily Journal

Area D, Trench 9

July 15, 2004

M. Eppihimer

Two initial concerns this morning: 1) defining the current extent of the brown, loose erosional fill in the N part of the trench and 2) removing the L11 floor. The latter is being done with an experimental microarchaeology procedure – HAP. A 50 by 50 cm area is being collected for fine sieving. The rest of the floor will be sieved normally (1/4 inch screen) and this information, along with the normal collection of data will provide a more complete and variably scaled picture.

Because the surface is packed earth and not a layer of pebbles and sherds that will easibly be removed, we have chosen to remove 3 cm deep from the entire surface area for the HAP. In the 50 by 50 cm sample, this resulted in 6.5 liters of soil (KT7). Note – for the rest of the surface there are animal holes, but it produced 51.5 liters, making a total of 57 liters.

After the removal of the surface as a HAP sample, I’ve switched to Locus 14, which covers the same area but is the packed earth/brick material beneath the HAP surface. Beneath this is an ash layer (Locus 16). Locus 14 has been divided into two parts. The northern part remains 14 but the southern bit is Locus15, because no ash layer is visible here. However, we did remove 10 cm of mudbricks from Locus 15.

We popped off some of the bricks in Locus 10 ringing the oven and it looks as if the ash continues underneath them. This will need to be considered further.

Finally, in the northern part of the trench we cut back some of the brown loose soil as Locus 13. After sweeping the area, we noticed the second line of pebbles from the baulk appearing in the section running E-W within the trench and diagonally NW-SE across the area, suggesting that although we may have cut through the layer near the baulk, we might be able to follow it downslope as we move towards the NE of the trench.