Daily Trench Journal

Area F

Trench 1

Began the day by excavating more of the pit 1077 in the SE corner of the trench. Then we stopped that because we were facing the possibility of losing context if we kept digging down in the ashy dirt.

We have a goal. My goal is to drop the trench down to the level of the stone cobbles, which are at the level of the bottom of the pit, which is currently L1057. This is at about 567.80m. Right now that is only about 20 cm lower than the rest of the trench. I think and hope that the cobbles which are at the bottom of this pit continue underneath the areas which we are currently excavating and that the cobbles turn out to be a rock surface. Right now we haven’t really been able to pick out any surfaces, and this is probably our best chance to have a really strong context.  So that is the long-term goal, but in the meantime we can’t just take a big pick to the entire trench. Really? No, we can’t.

In the meantime, no obvious changes in soil context of L1071.

Decided to work our way little by little down to the cobbles. We worked our way towards the west baulk in locus 1071. We worked our way down about 7 cm on our way towards the cobbles. We thought we were seeing some soil change, maybe to a darker soil, so we started a new locus, 1078 to replace 1071. Major props go out to my area supervisor and lovely wife Dawnell for showing me the soil change. Coming out of the south baulk there was a weird plastery thing that was very hard to dig. This seemed totally different from any other soil in the trench so we gave this small .3 x .4 m area the name of L1079.

Finally, noticed today that the pit 1075 was actually not a pit but was probably an ashy layer, which was underneath the clay surfaces 1071 and 1074. We dug it like a pit, but it appears to at least continue underneath L1074 for a while, while also continuing underneath to the E, in L1072. It may still be a pit, but there is much we still need to uncover.