7/14/06 Another busy and interesting day at Tsaghkahovit today, with many new loci and changes in all three operations. Beginning with WSI, we finished with locus 5 yesterday and today divided the remaining interior space of room I into two loci, locus 11 and locus 12. Locus 11 designates the western corner of the interior of the room, where the matrix is a very tan, silty clay. We're probably not far from the floor in this area. The remaining southwestern third of WSI became locus 12, which is still a dark brown silt wash, essentially identical to that of locus 5. Alongside the center of the southwest side of WSI, there are some large fallen boulders which will have to be broken and removed, probably on Monday. Elsewhere in operation WSI, I continued to focus today on the area of the probable doorway in the west corner of the operation. I sketched and photographed the rocks encountered at the bottom of locus 9, and will probably eventually remove these, but for now stopped in the area of locus 9. Instead, I decided to pursue the probable continuation of the doorway or passageway to the northwest, leading into room K. After removing the initial wash in this area as part of locus 6, I created locus 10 to mark a medium brown silt. Didn't have time to start excavating locus 10 today. In WSH, all attention focused on two tasks. The easier task was cleaning the southeast and northeast walls for Hasmik, who is expected to arrive next week. More challenging was the ongoing work on the floor of this room, and the attempt to define the relationship between the upper floor in the southeast and the lower level of the floor towards the center of the trench. I started by putting a 30 cm channel leading from the lower level to the upper level of the floor, as Adam had suggested, and troweled in this channel. Before long, it seemed as though we had clarified that the floor slopes downwards, although it was very difficult to differentiate the silty and mottled clay floor from the clay prep surface beneath it, and at times we may have passed through the actual, final living surface. The sloping floor is a very irregular and bumpy surface with several different shades and qualities of clays and silty clays. After the first channel, I shifted to the east with another 30 cm channel. After troweling this channel and again identifying the sloping of the floor, I decided to extend locus 22 to embrace the matrix just above the floor in this southeasterly direction. In short, the floor in WSH is proving extremely tricky to excavate. I think I will eventually collapse locus 18 and locus 28 into one locus. Locus 22 should also be examined as an integral part of this cultural level, since it is resting just above the floor, and at times is indistinguishable from the living surface. It is possible that we are dealing with two separate floors, but I think this is unlikely. More likely, the floor simply slopes rather severely from the southeast to the northwest.