We removed the large fragments of a vessel from under the hearth feature in L509, and placed the sherds in ceramics bag 3 for L509.
The soil in L516 is black towards the bottom, those is still loose and highly granular. It expanded out into a pit that is 50 cm x 60 cm. Some of the sherds from this context have a strange white accretion.
There was a very small piece of charcoal in the bottom of L517, which ended on top of a dark brown, small grained soil.
In the SW part of the locus, there are some more parts where there is the loose, highly granular, yellow matrix (like that in L516). After further investigation these expanded into 3 more circular pits (L517, L518, L519) located around the locus (see map), and one half-moon shaped, shallow pit (L520). All of these loci had very low artifact density. In Locus 513, we found a small fragment of a polishing stone (Ar/Ge.T19.513.L.02) and another ceramic “bottle stopper” (Ar/Ge.T19.CO.02). We found two more bone objects along the border between L513 and L515, both are phalanges (likely Bovid), one of which has a hole bored in (but not through) it (Ar/Ge.T19.513.B.02) and the other is highly polished (Ar/Ge.T19.513.B.03). There is a cluster of 3 small postholes on the southern border of the locus, at 2282.70 m. It seems to me that some of the more “squirrely” curvilinear black stains and the small pockets of loose sandy soil may be a result of rodent activity, but the long, linear (especially the raised one) black stains are likely cultural, as are the circular pits. Adam thinks this was some sort of work area.
We collected a small sample of charcoal for radiocarbon dating from L514 (Ar/Ge.T19.514.C14.01), just west of the wall fall on the eastern wall of the trench. There are a lot of burned bones coming out of this locus. We found a ceramic “bottle stopper” (Ar/Ge.T19.514.CO.01) in the NE corner of the locus, and a small fragment of a polishing stone (Ar/Ge.T19.L.01). We also found a rock which may be bronze ore, which Rueben will show to the geologists, as well as small thing I thought was bronze, but may actually be malachite.