Today we continued the burial, first by cleaning the dirt that we had used to close Locus 17, the rest of the sherds of the vessel. However, upon re-opening the vessel, we discovered that there were only two sherds remaining, which raises the question of where the rest of them went. Renegade suslik? Did we miss something when we cleaned the dirt that protected it? Did we misinterpret what we were looking at yesterday? In any case, we collected those two pieces separately as Locus 17, and it is possible (likely) that there may be other pieces of the vessel in the Locus 18 ceramic bag.
The burial yielded very little today, making it clear that we did the right thing by photographing it and removing the bones yesterday. There were some fragments that emerged today: a phalanx, some rib pieces, and other pieces that I can\\\'t identify. We screened everything today, with little result. We did find 2 teeth (not in the screen, just by troweling), and also there appears to be part of the maxilla remaining in the NW baulk. We found the maxilla around 3:45, so we put a bag down and more dirt, to open it tomorrow. Lori and I will lay out yet another extension and open it as soon as we can.
The rest of the burial itself is almost ready for final photos. We came down upon a more clayey matrix with very tiny lenses of charcoal, but nothing big enough to sample, unfortunately. I took two soil samples, based on recommendations by Maureen Marshall, one from near the body\\\'s femur (the body is Locus 20) and one from lower in the matrix, further from the bones.
In the rest of the site, Kathryn and Elizabeth are working on opening their floors in WSDA1 and 2, and that caused some confusion, which is understandable, given the generally poor preservation of the floors coupled with their uneven surfaces.