Very busy day in the T27 today. Since we closed out T22 (for now) yesterday, I had everyone working T27 today, which, at times got crowded. For this reason, I had Vato and Gennell clearing the eastern face of L06 (a wall?), and excavating in L07, which is downslope from the L05, which is often busy and crowded-- not only with people, but also with ceramics and wooden/charcoal beams. We started the day continuing the pass we began yesterday, which is a 10-15 cm pass throughout L05, starting in the SE corner. Adam suggested that we try to find the bottom of the large, intact ceramic jar in approximately the center of the locus, and use that as a guide for the surface it should be sitting on. Trouble is, in searching for the bottom of that jar, we came across the open mouth of what seems to be another wholly intact vessel-- also a jar, but seems to be skinnier than the first. This is confusing because the top/mouth of this new jar sits significantly (15-20 cm) below the mouth of the first jar, indicating that the first jar does not sit on a floor (at least not a floor which extends across the whole locus). Additional clearing exposed a number of new vessels (both broken and intact) and we seem to have at least 13 vessels total, 5 of which are whole. The stratigraphy is particularly puzzling because in addition to the ceramic vessels being seemingly interspersed at various elevations, burned beams also are mixed in with the ceramics at what seems to be various layers and elevations. While these layer are separated by only 10- 15 cm at the very most, it is difficult to understand what purpose such an uneven floor would have served (if it is a floor), or how certain vessels became elevated above others during the destruction. In any case, we’ll try to clean, pollen wash, taken soil samples, photograph and remove (at least some) of the vessels tomorrow. Toward the end of the day the wind had become so unbearable, and the stratigraphy so complicated to excavate-- plus the threat of possible rain-- led me to cover the vessels for today-- and move my workers into L09, which is a locus to the E of L06 (the wall) in order to better understand its eastern face.
I brought a very large soil sample back to the dig house for Roman to float, which he did right away. He came across a black substance that he described as “sticky and amorphous,” Adam thought it was bitumen. I also took a wood (not charcoal but actual preserved wood) and seed or coprolite sample for Roman. During screening of soil from L05 we also came across an obsidian point.