August 11, 2001

Today I took a half-day so I could get caught up on some paperwork. Nonetheless, the trench was full of excitement before breakfast when we were digging.

The day's focus was wall L5045 in the south of the trench, first by excavating up to the clear bricks on the outside edges (L5060), to the west and north of the mudbrick.

However, because the bottom of SE pit L5024 was mysteriously getting lower and lower everyday and can probably be correlated to the workers dumping dirt in there and shoveling it out, digging a little extra out every day. Thus, I asked them to flatten the bottom out, which turned up a third segment of the wall, a NW-SE portion (L5061) connecting to the SW-NE portion of L5045 near where it enters the baulk. Thus, we have three walls around an area of approximately 1.5m x 1.5m before the L5061 goes into the baulk itself. Further, a surface was discovered (L5063) on the inside of wall, lower than I expected it, which abuts with the walls, and also appears to abut a charcoal filled oven (L5062), which is also within the walls. Notably, the fill above the floor (L5058) was full of thin but large pieces of white/gray ash in which the grain of the wood was still visible (took some macro photos of it) and which possibly contains a few grain remains. At the moment, my obvious guess is that these are associated with the oven. Though I have found some similar deposits in the other parts of the trench, none are near so extensive and dense as those in the fill above floor.

Further digging also seems to indicate that the NW-SE portion of wall L5045 is not actually cut by pit L5024, but rather ends before reaching the baulk, near oven L5062, possibly having been a doorway in antiquity.

While I had one worker in the exciting SE corner, my other workers were busy cutting the SW and NW sections of the trench, in preparation for a future drawing of such.