We had a cool morning on site today, and sort of expected to be rained out relatively early, but the clouds and rain held off until later in the afternoon. Vartuhi opened up a new trench just to the S of T32 (which is called T33), leaving a 1 m baulk in between the two trenches. I had my workers spend much of the day cleaning T27 and removing the backfill, so we can lift the plastic tarp and use that level as a guide in excavating T32. The goal will be to get down to this level by the end of the week, which will leave me a week to do whatever drawing, artifact lifting, etc. is necessary next week and hopefully finish the trench before I leave for the US on 7/22. Once I return I can either help Vartuhi supervise the excavation of T33 or begin to excavate the baulk between T27 and T22. We'll also want to get some GPR survey done during those last few weeks. We took 2 "jar-stoppers" from the cleaning level in T27, but didn't take elevations or pinpoint measurements since these are obviously from a wash (they're sitting on top of the plastic tarp the workers put down last year when they backfilled). We also took a large C14 sample from L11.
It's unclear what the large storage vessel is doing in the N central part of the trench since it seems to be above any discernible destruction level-- maybe it was sitting on the wall and rolled off? Or was propped up against the N wall of the room, and didn't fall until after the roof and walls of the room had collapsed? After talking about this with Ruben and Adam at length, we'll just have to excavate from E to W in order to see the section beneath the pot and hopefully get a clue as to what happened.