F1JP08172002

Daily Trench Summary

Area F, Trench 1

August 17, 2002

Work today concentrated on taking down two areas, the fill in L1095 and the very large surface L1098. We will spend the time in this journal concentrating on descriptions of the two areas, as well as a small description of finds found today.

We began the day by pushing down the area around the fill L1095, as well as the new cobble slump 1101, down to level. On the last day at the site, the 15th, about half of the locus had been pushed down about 5 cm, which is where we found the cobble and large rock area which we now have named new locus L1101. We did not believe that there were any more cobbles, but even still we wanted to push down the rest of the locus to a level area to get a better flat view of the locus. We did so and we did uncover two very hard cobble areas, almost as though they had been cemented together, very small cobbles, along with a large rock. These areas appeared to be in a line going towards the W baulk. We theorize that the cobble and rock locus is a probable former wall that has collapsed, perhaps we actually have two walls, one running from N to S and the other one from E to W.

We then worked at pushing down in the main surface area L1098 which has taken up a large part of the trench, an area 3 meters by 2.4 meters. We had a fun time pushing down in this area for several reasons. Before we pushed down though, we grabbed three shards of pottery, all of which appeared to be good diagnostics, off of the surface because they were flat-lying pottery. These were KT#9. We also had two other nice finds of this day, a nice obsidian blade which was KT#4 and a quarter piece of a spindle whorl, which despite being only a quarter piece was a small find. This was KT#10.

So anyway, we went down in this locus about 5 cm, depending on location. The locus was hard packed clay, with black splotches. As we excavated it we could see that the area was the consistency of a hard dirt brick. There weren’t any bricks per se, but the area was a light hard packed clay surface.

Another highlight of the day was that as we excavated the surface we also uncovered the large jar which we believe was buried in the surface. It was fractured in several places, but complete. We aren’t going to be able to rescue it complete and unbroken, but it should easily be able to be reassembled. It looks real cool right now though.

CM