Place: Ar/Ts.WSH.30

This locus at first designated the stone formation in the eastern quadrant of the operation and the clay matrix below it. Thus, at first it was a feature. The feature ran parallel to the northeast wall and was composed of three lines of stones. Material quantities from among these stones proved few. The function of this feature is unclear. Despite initial speculation, it was not a burial. Inesa Karapetyan suggested that it is a wall of some sort, but I am not convinced. In any event, in dismantling this feature I was able to see the section beneath the floor, and to recognize at least three floor surfaces in this area of the room. After removing the stones, we dug beyond the area of the stones, to the west and north, and came upon a second floor below locus 18/28. Eventually, locus 30 became the entirety of the trench, i.e. the lower floor. Since the majority of this locus became the entirety of this lower floor, I changed the placetype to a subsurface deposit. Thus, locus 30 expanded from initally marking just the stone feature to marking also the materials on the floor below. For this reason, although the top elevation of the stone feature was 2140.968, it seems more appropriate to give the top elevation as that of the floor of locus 28, which is the elevation indicated above. The bottom elevation, in turn, is the near-bedrock prep surface beneath the lower floor.