After a day off yesterday, it was back to work in T22 and T27 today. We lifted all the ceramics from the second layer of sherd scatter in T22.L108, and tried to reach bedrock. The locus produced 11 bags of pottery (and counting), and while we did get to the bedrock in the western edge of the locus, the center and eastern edge has a dark brown soil which continues down. This layer has much less cultural material (i.e. ceramics), but it is certainly not bedrock. With the bedrock (seemingly) so close at hand, I’m going to continue to try to reach it tomorrow-- if not, perhaps we’re digging into some sort of EB pit or construction which used the bedrock as its western wall.
In T27, Adam correctly suggested that we would be fine using shovels for at least the top twenty centimeters. Turns out, we would’ve been ok taking off the top 50 cm, since this layer (beneath the topsoil) was a light gray, ashy layer (what Adam appropriately referred to as “moon dust”). Not sure what this is a result of, since this would be a tremendously thick burn layer, and charcoal is only present at its very bottom (or the top of the next layer which must be the real burn layer). Thus, it is hard to figure what this ashy/silty layer is. I anticipate that we will reach the burn layer, or at least the very top of it tomorrow (and may have gotten there already by the end of the day, since charcoal was much more prevalent than higher up and in larger samples). If we reach the burn layer tomorrow I will take a sample for Roman, in addition to a burned feature (post hole?) in L108, which I meant to sample today, but gave Hannah my soil sample bags so she could sample instead.