Today was a very full day. I had the team start in the morning with finishing the removal of Locus 12, the dark silty matrix extending out from the western corner. A fragmentary grinder/polisher was found in this locus. After they finished this, I opened Locus 13 as the other half of the operation and the tannish/brown clay-y matrix with organic splotches, which runs into the southern corner where there is a jumble of small stones. They did one full pass of this locus, to the SW wall of the room, and immediately a linear feature of stones appeared about half a meter out from the partition wall. At the same time, Artur was troweling in the southern corner and exposed underneath the jumble of small rocks next to the wheelbarrow ramp several pieces of a large, thin-walled and seemingly low-fired vessel that had been crushed by the rock fall, potentially from the SW wall or a doorway. The shovel pass had gone about ten centimeters below this point, so I had them stop digging further and level out this area and clean it for pictures. I designated this vessel and its immediate area as Locus 14. It is nestled against the wheelbarrow ramp, and is about 1 meter from the partition wall. It is possible that some of the large fragments of ceramic that were found while excavating Locus 7 above belong to this vessel, or Locus 10, the shortening of the wheelbarrow ramp. After about half of Locus 13 had been removed I had two workers start cleaning the top of the wall (Locus 3) to have less people in the trench, and I had two workers start troweling the wall and the excavated surface. We only had one wheelbarrow today so the removal of the soil went more slowly.
I designated the linear stone feature 15, and while troweling I found one small but compact piece of charcoal right next to one of the stones. A lot of the earth had been removed before I could start collecting for Locus 15, but the matrix does appear to be a slightly more orangish color and has organic and chalky splotches around the stones. The feature runs about 5 meters in length as of today, but because of the slope of the excavated surface it is possible that there are more stones closer to the doorway into WSAD. It is also possible that there is another course to this feature, as was seen in the features in WSAC (Feature 26) and WSAD (Feature 16). The linear feature ends about 2 m from the SW wall, where there is a gap and a large, irregularly shaped area of black soil, that might represent a burning event or some sort of organic residue. I only troweled the surface of this and did not give it a locus yet.
After troweling and cleaning the surface of these features and loci, I drew them, took photographs and took measurements. At the very end of the day I decided to take the exposed fragments of the vessel in Locus 14 so that they would not risk damage overnight, and left the rest of it in situ for excavation tomorrow. If feature 15 and the vessel of 14 represent some sort of contemporary activity/occupation, their elevation is noticeably higher (roughly 20-40 cm) than the floor discovered last year in WSAC. Tomorrow I want to discuss with Lori and the workers the possibility of 1) leveling the excavated surface, since right now the bottom of Locus 13 has about a 35-40 cm slope to the S, and 2) the removal or transfer of the wheelbarrow ramp since it is potentially covering some important features or a possible doorway into the room. There are also two or three large stones that might need to be broken after work as they seem to be floating.