6/29/2013
Ar/Ts.WSDA1.01
Today was very hot and sunny, even in the morning. In the afternoon, it became a bit cloudy and even drizzled for a few minutes.
This morning we bought new shovels, but had to take them to town to weld them, so they wouldn\\\'t break. However, by the end of the day, half of the shovels used had broken anyway.
We had some bovine visitors overnight, who left some cow patties scattered in and around the trench. We shoveled much of this off, along with the remaining sod.
We laid out WSDB for Lori and Elizabeth F to work on.
My workers today were Sahag, Gor, Gago (full name Gagik), and Arkady, who was substituting for Boris. We began removing sod, starting from the NW edge of the trench, so that when Lori\\\'s crew reaches the SE side of their trench, there won\\\'t be confusion. In order to make the work go faster, I had Gor begin working simultaneously on the SE side.
In the W corner, outside the wall, there are several smaller rocks, among which were found an astragalus and a sherd. We collected the astragalus (because I picked it up), but left the sherd. It will be a new locus, but it will be left for Cynthia to complete.
Removal of the topsoil was slow at the beginning of the day, but by lunch, nearly half of the topsoil had been removed. We expected to finish, closing Locus 1 by the end of the day. While it was completed, it was not mapped or photographed, yet.
We removed several mid-sized stones from the center of the trench, when no stones were discovered to be in contact with them. Three very large stones were removed, that look like wall stones, which likely tumbled from the walls.
The SW wall is reasonably well-defined, but has one possible break on the W half of the wall. The SE wall is perfectly defined, including the bordering line of rocks on the other side of the wall (both N and S sides of the wall, in other words).