Daily Trench Journal

Area D

Trench 8

May 24, 2005

At 6:00am trench D8 was flat except for: loci 54, which was raised for further investigation; L55, the wall; and pit L30 which was still present though it was only 7cm deep. There was a raised area approx 80 cm square which was raised 10 cm above the rest of the trench (L56). This area was there in order to enable me to articulate and study L54 the burial. To do this I began by using a small pick to bring the area within 5cm of the edge of the burial. once that was done I was able to use a trowel and a brush to articulate the hard pack which had surrounded the burial. I was able to determine that the pack clearly did continue under the space where the body was. I was not able to completely articulate it because the material was very dry and brittle and broke easily. I took multiple shots what was uncovered. To the east three large rocks were found. They may not have been associated with the burial. One, a large flat rock made of basalt was partially submerged directly under the burial area; 4-5cm of soil separated the bottom of the burial and the top of the stone. When the burial was removed and the stone lifted the side of the stone that was facing down had a small divot in it.

The material that made up the ‘casing’ which the body was in was not plaster as previously thought, it is simply harder packed mud. Before we removed the stone Bradley, Bekir and I sat down to discuss what we should do with it. While it is very interesting we determined that nothing could be gained by removing it in sections and doing a float sample on it. If it is just a hard packed mud it is likely that it was mud made from the soil nearby or from the Tigris and therefore there would not be chips of stone or bone which would give us information about how they lived. The hard packed mud seems to have encompassed the entire burial however, when the pot was first lifted there was no mud pack, only a sandy soil. One theory for how this pack occurred was that the bowl was taken, lined with mud, and then the baby was placed in. When the bowl was turned upside down the mud shifted and filled the soil of the hole which was dug for the pot to be placed in and stayed separated because it is of a different consistency. Another possibility is that the bowl was filled with mud, the body placed in and then it was coved with mud. This would explain the difference in the curvatures. The curve of the pack which was in the bowl (facing up) and the curve that was in the open part of the bowl (facing down) which was relatively shallow or flat. Either way it is clear that the body was packed in soil inside the bowl.

Once that was completely removed I took elevations and we brought that area down to the rest of L56. While I had been articulating L54 my workmen had been bringing down the northern part of the trench. While they were doing this they discovered an ashy area with some bones sticking out. When the rest of the trench was sufficiently low we began looking at the ashy area which had at first appeared to be 30cm in diameter but turned out to be almost a meter (.95m). We were able to find the edge by the difference in the soil. The fill of the pit is very soft and a dark ashy material. I was not able to munsell it today because the rain made everything wet and very dark. There was a very large amount of bone in the fill, everything from larger joint pieces (up to 10cm) to small broken fragments. There is also pottery and lithics. The lithics pieces include large cores. Some of the pottery sherds are ubaid. There were also so soil fragments with the imprint of organic material, probably reed. I took a macro photo of several of these impressions but I did not keep the items. We are sifting the buckets but are only picking up exceptional pieces of bone because there is so much. In the first ten centimeters we took up three envelopes of bone. The pit appears to be very deep and so excavation will continue tomorrow.

The sherds are ubayid but when Bradley, Bekir and I stood back and consulted the baulks it was clear that the current level of my trench is almost a full meter above the ubayid trench. Because of this it seems unlikely that the pit is an original ubyid context. More probably the sherds were brought up when the pit was dug.