Car accident on the way to the bakery for lunch this morning; luckily, Hasmik and Armine who caught most of the force of the collision are okay, and Jeff and Connor seem to be okay too. But it was a shaky morning, and we arrived to Tsaghkahovit around 10.
Lilit has started drawing both WSAC and WSAD, beginning with the NE wall of the two rooms and the partition wall.
In the morning I started the guys cleaning the area around Feature 27, in Locus 31 in the doorway, as well as sweeping the floor. I debated whether to take floor photos with the northern corner area still a mess, with stones sticking out of both clay and a looser brown soil matrix, seemingly unassociated with the walls, floor, or feature 16 in the eastern corner. I decided instead to wait and investigate the northern corner, which I declared as Locus 33, a 2 by 1.85 m area outlined by the reddish clay seen on the lower courses of the walls and scattered throughout Locus 30, northeast of the paved floor. This locus, after removing the floating rocks within, quickly turned into a large pit, lined with baked red clay. The matrix inside was a looser brown soil, with some isolated areas of charcoal. It doesn't seem like a hearth, although I did not some areas of a grayer color, and I took two soil samples (a and b) from different depths. The pit also contained a fair amount of artifacts, including bone and ceramic. Several pieces of a vessel of likely LBA date, including handle and rim, were found in the center of the pit underneath one of the rocks. I managed to take two charcoal samples, one which appears to be a charred bone or wooden object. Two other small finds appeared; worked stone and bone. The pit bottomed out about 50 cm down, and the entire surface was therefore the baked red clay.
The dating of this pit is therefore somewhat straightforward, in that it appears to be an earlier (likely BA pit) covered over in the Iron III period by the paved floor, which then sank into the pit after disuse. However, since the clay is the same that coats some of the stones of the walls, particularly in the northern corner, it is more confusing to investigate the relation of the pit to the walls, or even to Feature 16 to the east. Could the baked clay coating on the walls be another occupation feature, or is the pit related to an earlier phase of the same room, or an even earlier phase than the room itself? Moreover, the pit fits almost perfectly into the northern corner of the room, between the paved floor and the linear feature against the SE wall.
Understanding the ceramics next year will hopefully help.
I took photographs of the floor with this pit fully excavated.
Also today, we excavated a small circular area of charcoal south of the paved stone floor, against the SE baulk, even with what I designated as the clay floor contemporaneous with the paved one. This area (Locus 43) quickly became a gritty orange matrix, mixed with some wet orange/yellow clay, that might be a combination of the bedrock and floor prep. The feature was sterile, and had no artifacts. I need to do a probe tomorrow, as the final action in WSAD, to find bedrock, to see if this is right.