Having worked with our wall trenches at 20 cm below the surface for several days -- we decided to take all of the units down another five centimeters or so. At 20 cm we are still in the transition from the bottom of the plowzone to undisturbed features -- in simple terms, the tops of the wall trenches are still a bit "blurry." Five centimeters deeper, we were able to begin seeing the trench outlines much more clearly.
The crew put in 200% today -- taking seven units down five centimeters on our hottest and most humid day to date. They also shoveled out another excavation unit on the east wall -- a critical unit for understanding the overlapping set of wall trenches described below.
On the northwest corner of the structure, several of the students cleaned up and mapped the newly exposed features.
Excavations of part of one of the west walls revealed a tiny but exceptionally well preserved bone bead.
As the work proceeded today, it became clear that some of our confusion over the many wall trenches is because we actually have several partially overlapping buildings -- some of which have been rebuilt several times.
Here with some of our new interpretations highlighted (different colors represent probable different buildings)...
From another angle...
And here also with our new interpretations highlighted...
There are a number of other wall trenches present that we haven't quite figured out yet -- we'll work on re-cleaning the units on Saturday morning and hope to have some cleaner maps by Monday.
A long hot humid day of hard work over -- more news on Saturday!