2008-07-08. Tuesday. I worked with Roman today, further excavating the burning feature and coming up with some interesting stuf, but no further andiron fragments. After i took opening levels R came by and asked if he could take soil samples from my hearth feature. so together we cleaned the top of locus 108 over to the south baulk, which confirmed 2 things: the burning and red soil does pretty much stop at the wall to the south of the hearth, and the stratigraphic cut (which is about 30 cm west of the hearthstone uncovered today at that point-- measurements tomorrow) goes all the way across the trench almost. we also uncovered what might be a posthole on the south side of the trench near the wall-- i took a photo. after cleaning, i defined the area of burning around the andiron, as far as the wall, as locus 112 (of course the sherd scatter has been removed and labeled as within locus 108. S. succeeded in almost completing (finally!) the excavation of locus 110. we removed dirt with buckets today, which was an improvement if not a panacea. the workers worked in shifts leveling out locus 109, which i want to at least be at the same level before we take another pass-- there seems to be some interesting coloration in the bottom of the middle area. ...west of the andiron we uncovered a flat stone, about the perfect size for a person to kneel on, facing the hearth. to the north and slightly east of this stone was a smaller, also smooth stone. the larger stone had been cracked by a large rock which seems to have fallen out of the wall at some point. to the south of the large flat stone i uncovered a number of small objects in stone-- one round stone, a long stone and two fragments of some sort of worked stone. also, lying underneath the andiron fragment is a long wierd pointy piece of roughly worked stone. tomorrow we will remove these and potentially achieve some clarity.