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Weekly Trench Summary

Area D

Trench 5

Week Ending August 11, 2002

The two mains goals for this week were to give the human skeleton in the far NW a proper excavation and determine to what context it belongs, in particular if it relates to the Ubaid contexts in the S, and to prepare the trench for a plan shot, which entailed sorting out the N pit situation, cleaning up nicely and trying to find the N extent of the Ubaid contexts.

The first goal was pretty straight-forward and, from my point of view, is simply a time sink and thankfully a week is enough time to get it mostly done. However, according to Andrew, one of the bone experts kind enough to take time to work on the remains, it is a particularly tricky skeleton due to its flexed and prone position and the age and generally poor preservation of the skeleton. Nonetheless, cleaned off the skeleton does look rather impressive positioned the way it is. Early guesses put its lifetime age between 20 and 50, likely towards the later end of that spectrum and possibly assign its gender as female, though the crushed nature of the bones (notably the pelvis) make the second assertion a bit more tenuous. Speaking of the age of the skeleton as a deposit, a Late Chalcolithic rim sherd found literally within the skeleton allows us to make a good argument for it dating to that period (and thus not the Ubaid).

The northern pit situation went well, large NE ash pit L5116 was shown to cut both E-central oven L5111 and N-central plaster-lined pit L5122. L5116 was a bit larger than expected but nothing earth-shattering while L5122 turned out to be more shallow and smaller than expected, save that we may have uncovered more of it now that we’re under L5116 in parts of the central-E.

On the other hand, tracing the Ubaid surfaces proved tricky because, though we were under the pits we had already seen, we came into traces of new pits and/or foundation trenches after tracing the Ubaid context about 30 more cm N. At this point we decided it was best to take the plan shot before the long-exposed S contexts took any additional damage and considering the needed time investment to try and find a fragmentary and possibly not-even-extant surface, especially given it was already shown the burial was later.

Procedures for next week are to excavate the exposed Ubaid context, in the process double-checking our work to date, and then preparing the trench for close-down.

Descriptive Attribute Value(s)
Journal Type Weekly
Date 2002-08-11
Year 2002
Has note The purpose of the daily journal was to record the activities taking place in a trench each day. This included which loci were excavated, how and why loci were excavated and the ongoing impressions of the relationships among loci. It should be noted that journals record the actions, impressions and ideas of trench supervisors during the excavations. They are not, therefore, the final interpretations or syntheses of the emerging data.
Suggested Citation

JW. (2012) "D-5-2002-08-011-Weekly from Asia/Turkey/Kenan Tepe/Area D/Trench 5". In Kenan Tepe. Bradley Parker, Peter Cobb (Ed). Released: 2012-03-28. Open Context. <https://opencontext.org/documents/3e0f8899-d980-48ce-2e59-a64920811f9b> ARK (Archive): https://n2t.net/ark:/28722/k22v2hs61

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