F1JP08072002

Daily Trench Journal

Area F, Trench 1

August 7, 2002

I wasn’t even out at the site today, I was ill once again, but my trench was in action. Lots of exciting stuff going on in the trench, so let’s get on with the journal, most of it written by Area F supervisor Dawnell Moon.

We began by taking down the area west of the cobbles so that it was even with the area around the cobbles. This was a job of about 3 to 5 cm. We worked the entire area to the east baulk. Dawnell munselled the soil at 10 yr 5/3 brown, although I think the soil in my trench is usually more of the 7.5 yr variety. The area produced minimal amounts of pottery and almost no bone or stone. We found what may be a piece of metal.

This area all of the sudden hit the mother lode of really nice lithics. We found 3 nice blades. Two of them appear to be CHERT, the other one is a nice obsidian blade. These lithics were entered into the Kenan Tepe database as small finds and KT’s 20-22 in the locus that we were excavating, which was L1083.

As we pushed back on this surface we found some pebbles beginning to appear. We are trying to follow the pebbles to see if there is a pebble surface. We also found an area of red dirt in the NE about 50 cm from the cobbles right against the baulk. This may be a possible wall forming. We are troweling it down looking for lines.

We are also taking down the fill area between L1080 and L1069, also known as L1088, between the two cobble areas we have found to see if they connect. As we did so we found potsherds from a very large vessel. The rim is almost 5 cm thick and the diameter is about 30 cm. We found about half of the rim. We are screening all dirt from this area.

We also took down part of the large wall that extended through the majority of the trench, L1080. It seems to be only one course lending credence to the theory that it is a pavement. We left an area intact near the west baulk so that it can continue to be used as a step to hand buckets out of the trench.

DSM, CM