2009 season, day 12

Well, as expected, we did a great deal of work cleaning up after the JCB today. As a result, I'm feeling a bit queasy, but I assume that'll pass.

And, though I tried a couple of times, I really didn't get any pictures of the work that was being done. Which was a genuine achievement -- there was an awful lot of material dislodged by the excavator, and most of it is gone, up what is now a very steep slope.

But I did manage to get a shot that conveys an impression of what we did yesterday, if not the whole of it.

In the picture to the left, we're looking mostly eastward, towards the large apsidal wall; you can sort of see another stone coming through -- we exposed perhaps an inch or so of it. And, interestingly, now that we're going down, it seems that the rubbly fill is now limited to the robber trench of the wall; the material to the south is much more ashy and clayey, though I have not been able to find anything as regular as a pit there.

Tomorrow, I hope to dig more in that trench; it does seem to be later material than anything else we have in the square, so logic dictates that we dig it first, and that'll give us a cross-section of the material to the south, which should inform how we excavated that, as well.