7/12/06 It was a busy day in the field today, and another day with visitors, this time Sue Alcock and John Cherry. There were many new developments in all three operations. In WSH, I continued to take down the extension of locus 21. As with the center of this operation, this extension is also full of what appear to be fallen rocks, but will go further down before deciding to remove any of these. Also continued to try and define the edges of locus 22, the silt wash area in the middle of the room, below the area of locus 13. It is clear that there is no floor here, perhaps, according to Adam, due to variable taphonomic processes, whereby water has collected in the center of the trench and has caused the clay floor to disappear. What is strange to me is the absence, thus far, of the white clay matrix that tends to preceed bedrock across this site. Why is there still a wash silt at this depth? The area is too big to be a pit. Material quantities in this area are high. I will continue to take this down tomorrow. By Adam's advice, I will also impose a somewhat arbitrary boundary to this locus, roughly dividing the trench in half, and take the area further down in the hopes of seeing the floor in the section of this cut. But before doing any of this, I will sample the parts of the floor that are visible. Spent much time troweling the southeast side of the floor today. It's clear we have a white clay surface with a thin layer of a mottled clay and silt floor above, which I had to trowel away in some places to understand what was going on. Will sample this surface tomorrow. In the process of troweling, I identified what appears to be a pit in the east corner, although it's edges are not clearly visible yet and thus far it isn't particularly rich in materials. A very large and flat rock has appeared towards the bottom of this pit, which is locus 23. Elsewhere in WSH, I troweled off the top of the northeast wall, in preparation from Hasmik's visit next week. This area is locus 24. In WSG, we continued to remove dirt from and screen locus 9. In the process, we started to clarify the situation in the west corner of the trench, where we've begun to remove fallen rocks which either block a doorway or the corner of the wall. And in WSI, in addition to continuing to remove the wash silt from locus 5, I created two new loci, locus 7 and 8, in the western area of the southwest wall, where it appears we have a doorway leading out of the room. At the bottom of locus 6 we encountered an unusual cluster of stones that appeared to be deliberately arranged in a rectangular fashion. However, after digging along the side of this cluster, it became clear that they were resting on dirt, so I took out these stones in locus 7. Continued further down into locus 8, a lighter brown silt, only to encounter another cluster of stones, one of which apppears to have been a paving stone, a white stone flattened on two sides, perhaps limestone. Will continue to work in the area of locus 8 tomorrow. All around, a busy and productive day.