7/18/06 Compared to recent days, it was a relatively calm day in the field today. One team of workers spent the entire day breaking and then removing the large boulders from WSI, particularly along the southwest wall. We also continued to work in WSH, cleaning the northwest baulk, removing the remaining fallen boulders in the western area of the northwest extension, removing rocks scattered across the interior of the room, and troweling and sweeping the entire floor (locus 18 and locus 28) so that I could photograph it. Tomorrow I will take pollen samples and then draw and excavate the possible burial, before excavating down below the floor. In the end, given all the confusion with the two levels of the floor, the trench looks relatively even, although this may partly have been fabricated by our trowels. That said, there is a packed clay surface across the entirety of the trench, which varies in color and siltiness. Dark earth patches were encountered across the trench particularly in the area of the ovens, and C14 samples were collected from two such patches towards the east, just to the south of the burial. In WSG, I decided to leave covered the in situ vessels discovered yesterday and work on bringing the southeastern and southwestern area of the trench down to the same level as locus 12 before exposing the floor. This L shaped locus is locus 13, distinguished from locus 12 by a lighter brown, clayish silt. Not surprising, therefore, that we came upon the white clay matrix rather quickly at the bottom of locus 13, particularly along the southeast wall. Strange that this floor surface is so markedly different from the silty floor encountered in locus 12, but it's possible that the living surface was simply not preserved as well towards the southeast. In any case, I think by tomorrow it will be possible to trowel down the entire trench from the southeast wall until the area of locus 12, where the in situ pots await us.