Why I hate floors

Floors. Not a huge fan of them right now. Oh they're all right in the abstract and certainly very useful in preventing me from plummeting six stories to the ground below, but man, they are a pain in the butt when working in the trench. Especially my trench. We have floors popping up everywhere, which is nice because they can, in theory, provide us with correlations between different sets of walls (oh goodness...the walls!) and building phases but they are a pain to deal with. Once a floor is found, we have to slow down our work and carefully brush out/trowel out all the dirt that might be on top of that floor (and sometimes that floor will disappear) and get the surface nice and clean so that it can be photographed/drawn/elevated. And then we get to break up the floor with picks and chisels. Totally fun--particularly now that the dig is getting hot. The brick walls surrounding our trench act like an oven in the afternoons by retaining heat and blocking any access to a breeze which makes it...sticky. But yeah, we have lots of floors to deal with; just take a look at this baulk preservation of the floor layers we've found so far in the southern half of the room:

So on the right side, we have the remains of the latest level--a cocciopesto floor. Below that (on the left) is a floor made up of amphora shards inlaid in a concrete, which rests directly on top of a different concrete floor (the small sliver to the left of that). The little terrace in front is yet another layer of floor and the lowest one we've found.

Of course the one benefit of floors is that they provide "seals" on the layers below them, by which we can use whatever is within that sealed locus to date the earliest time (and probably within a 10-20 year window) when the floor could have been constructed. We've been finding mainly pottery shards (including a really neat and rare 1st century type up fineware) but those only give approximate data. What we really like are coins and...I found one yesterday under the lowest level of floor. Pretty cool stuff. Now we just have to wait for our numismatist to clean it off and give a look and then we'll have a much better idea of an earliest date for this floor level.