We finally reached bedrock in L108 today, after dropping it another few centimeters and finding a few more sherds. In total, we have 11 bags of ceramics from this locus, in addition to a bone and obsidian bag. There is a curious line of stones (perhaps an EB wall) along the E edge of the locus, and in order to better understand them, I’ve opened a new locus to the E of L108, which is L110. L110 also includes the cleaning of a series of rock fall/tumble/rows of stones which are in the very southern end of the trench. Ruben wants to have the architect draw these in before removing them to better understand what is an increasing palimpsest of walls.
In T27 we made good progress today, working our way through an additional pass. There is a lot of charcoal in this layer, indicating that we are probably just above the burn layer. I took an additional six C14 samples today (burnt bone, charcoal and a seed/pit combo), which might be over kill, but better to have the samples than not. We also found a jar stopper (Ar/Ge.T27.02.CO1) and an oblong stone pendant with a hole drilled at one end (Ar/Ge.T27.02.L02). These were both in the fill layer which is ashy and has continued down for 45 or 50 cm by this point. At the very end of the day (with about ten minutes left) we came across the top of a burned wooden beam, which must represent the top layer of the burn level. I decided to recover this and leave it until tomorrow, so we can dedicate more time and focus to it first thing in the morning. All in all a good day.
Adam also shot in all my benchmarks to date (so now I have elevations for #1-#7). The absolute elevations for these can be found in the second to last page of my notebook.