2009 season, days 16 and 17

Despite a couple of attempts to find a work around, I don't have a camera for the moment, so I can't actually show you what's been happening.

That's somewhat less problematic for day 16 than you might think; I unfortunately managed to get backed up on putting the notes I had into the system, so I had to take a day off digging to do that. You can imagine how hard it was to sit in an air conditioned room typing, rather than carry buckets of dirt around in the heat.

(Actually, I really would rather have been on the site. But notes need to be organized in a format that other people can understand, so needs must.)

Today also didn't go as well as might have been hoped. One of the new volunteers slipped on entering the square this morning, and seems to have done some damage to her ankle. I feel terrible about this; it's one of those things that you wish you could undo as soon as you see it happen.

There was a fair amount of dirt moved, after that -- there's a layer of orange-brown material that stretches over most of the area north of the stone feature, and we took out a lot of that, and we took out the last of the stones that seem to have fallen from that feature. That was one of the two major goals I had for the day, so that, at least, was accomplished, but the other goal was to clarify the relationship between the orange-brown fill and a layer of pottery rich fill, and that proved bafflingly hard to do; we'll probably take another stab at it tomorrow, assuming that all goes well.