Daily Trench Journal

Area D

Trench 8

5-26-05

Today with loci 55 gone and loci 58 completely excavated there is nothing to do but continue to bring the whole trench down. We are continuing to bring down loci 59, the loci in the western half of the trench. In the western baulk I can see an ashy layer and a larger mud brick layer, possibly slump. We never found these layers in the fill loci, we must have missed them when we went through the area with picks or they were so broken up that we could not have seen them. The ubaid house was 1m 40cm below a ceramic and cobble surface which is visible in both my trench D8 and D5 which is next door and which had the ubaid house. Currently the highest locus is 68cm below that surface. The pit goes down even further, another 60cm. This means that the bottom of the pit should be on top of the ubaid layer. One troubling point about this is that there is nothing visible in the inside of the pit, no mud bricks, and no surfaces. This may mean that there is nothing for the nest 60cm.

Because the trench is getting fairly deep I decided to stop and straighten the baulks. Lokeman did this while the other guys scraped and brushed flat the lower surface of L59. As the North West area was being scraped we came across a wall and what appears to be a floor. When we further scraped I was able to positively ID the floor as touching the edge of the pit. The east side of the trench was almost 10cm higher because we had not brought down that part of L56. This allowed me to have 2 guys follow the floor, starting at L59 and moving eastwards towards the baulk. When they did this the found another floor surface which is cracked and broken and at a steep angle into the eastern baulk which is only 20cm above topsoil. There appears to be some burnt mud brick next to it. When Lynn came by the trench she pointed out how there were multiple burnt marks in contemporaneous surfaces in this trench. This may mean that at one point all the buildings burned.