F1JWS052002

Week 5 Summary

Area F, Trench 1

August 5, 2002

This week was characterized by a change in the general philosophy of the trench. This comes from the realization that there is a limited amount of time left on the dig for this season. At the most there are about two weeks left until we stop digging. Yet, because of the general confusion at attempting to understand my trench during this season we have been unable to dig quickly. One of the goals of my trench at the start of this season was to be able to arrive at the same level that the Chalcolithic Oven from F4 was at. It appears that we still are about .5 meters higher than that level. For this reason we are trying to dig even faster than normal this week to obtain good contexts, and also hopefully to find the same context that led to the huge oven in trench F4.

We used a general strategy of digging down in 10 cm increments with a big pick this week to drop down to a context that we could analyze. Yesterday, at the end of this week, it appeared that we were finally coming down upon a rather interesting context that should be fun to analyze. After we finish taking out some of the loci that are still pedestaled above the rest of the trench, including L1069, L1076, and L1080, we should be able to have the entire trench at the level of our new interesting context.

This new context is a very interesting cobble surface which at the present time extends from the corner where the N and E baulks meet which is about .5 to .7 meters in width and right now extends about 3 meters long, although digging in the future may show that this actually extends for the length of the trench from the NW corner to a spot below where the former cobble surface 1057 was. A surface such as this one undoubtedly has some interesting contexts and surfaces associated with it, and we are very excited about continuing our work in the next week.

Before running into the cobble surface most of the time this week was spent using the big pick to remove large amounts of dirt from areas that we don’t fully comprehend.

Our goal for the week to come will be to find any surfaces associated with the cobble surface, as well as to figure out the relation between the cobble surface and the other surfaces.

CM