Another short day today due to rain. Roman was helping out in the trench and he helped unearth three more large LB storage jars. None of these are intact, like the first, however all the pieces seem to be in place, indicating that they were likely smashed in situ. Roman took three bags of soil for flotation from around these jars. In the meantime, I spent most of the morning trying to carefully excavate a large burned beam in the center of the trench. This beam, which sits above the jars, but seemingly represents the topmost portion of the destruction layer, was very hard to excavate in one piece because while the outsides of the beams were burned, then insides had rotted, turning to soil. So, a number of times after I had wrapped a portion of the beam with string, the soil inside gave way and the whole thing collapsed. In any case, I did get atleast one decent sample, which might be useful for dendrochronology or for wiggle-matching. I have more hope for some of the beams that are still beneath the soil, the tops of which we only just came across yesterday. We’ll try to excavate those in one piece on Monday. We did not remove any of the jars, but covered them with plastic and soil before the rain. Ruben and Adam will both be on site on Monday and can help with their removal. We also found another stone bead during screening, a stone tool (grinder?) and took a radiocarbon sample from the area between the flat stones and the “stone box” (L03) in the NE corner of the locus.
In T22, the situation continues to be confusing. On the one hand, the wall tumble which appeared in L103, the eastern part of L108, and L110, has continued, especially in the N portion of the trench. In order to have better control over the dismantling of this stone pile I closed L110, and opened two loci beneath it: L111 which represents the area beneath the north half of L110; and L112, which represents the area beneath the southern half of L110. We removed a few more rocks and are cleaning in L111, but on Monday, I hope we can bring L112 even with L111 before continuing deeper in L111.