Daily Journal

Area D

Trench 5

July 29, 2002

The first part of the morning was spent doing final cleaning from the baulk reduction: removing the sandbags which had been placed to protect the fragile features and sweeping up afterwards. This didn’t take too long, especially with the temporary addition of one of the foremen, Cengis, to my crew for the day. Damage from the baulk reduction was minimal, if even extant.

With the possibility of preventable damage out of the day way, I began work on central-East oven L5111 today. Unless I see a good visual or textural break, I’m going to be excavating the interior of the feature in arbitrary 10 cm levels. After the first 10 cm, the locus was changed to L5120. Finds from the oven have, so far, been unremarkable safe for some very good but not unexpected carbon samples.

I also took this opportunity to continue work on the S side of the mudbrick structure’s N wall, starting with the SE "room." I excavated this as two units, L5119 in the E, including the area thought to be under the oven, and continuing as L5107 in the W. In the S of L5107 we came across a portion of a hard surface with some serious charcoal on it, not too unlike the hard surface in the W part of the house (under L5097). This leads me to believe something I had been suspecting for a while—the organic encrusted dip to the S of the oven was not related, but actually the bottom of a pit cutting the entire context. I would suspect I missed this by assuming a final texture/color change in the large organic pit at higher levels in that area to have been the end of the pit when, in fact, it was simply a different unit of stratification within the pit. Also lending credence to this theory were small, unfollowable concentrations of the organic material of L5098, which either a) originally had a larger extent and were cut by the pit; b) a surface of the material was destroyed during the creation of the pit and small portion were tossed around and preserved; or c) both.

I also think now that there might be multiple phases of construction as I may be coming down on an earlier, but slightly differently oriented, SW-NE wall and possibly a second wall at a NW-SE orientation which would have either been below, cut by, or incorporated into the structure-attached oven.

In hopes of finding the final level of surface, I also dug the loci surrounding the N conclusion of grain surface L5098 to the level of its conclusion. Results from this have been pretty good, revealing some good concentrations of flat-lying sherds with Ubaid shapes and/or painting. Some may even be possible to reconstruct to good effect.