Daily Trench Journal

Area F

Trench 1

July 31, 2002

I would have to say that today was one of the better days in my trench that we have had this season. I would attribute nearly all of the good feelings of this day to the inclusion in our wheelbarrow of a new tool that we made excellent use of. The workers know it as the Buyuk Kazma. Others not versed in Turkish refer to it as "The Big Pick." But I digress, let’s look at the progress that we had today.

We fully articulated the cobble surface 1057 today. We stole Cengis from Katie for the first hour or so of the day to articulate the cobbles and clean them up really nice for a plan shot from Drew. After we had cleaned up the cobbles we were able to have Drew come down and take a small plan shot for locus 1057 with accompanying loci 1061 and 1082 to the sides. This surface looks really nice now, and this excited us. Granted, this had nothing to do with the Big Pick.

We looked at the area that still remained of L1072. The area that we had left because we thought we could see lines. We couldn’t see any rhyme or reason to the area still left. There were mudbricks, but where were they going? What were they doing? Were they in fact part of the large pavement we could never fully articulate? These were just some of the thoughts going through our heads in the two minutes it took to blast through all that was left of this area and bring it down to level with the surrounding area. This was joy brought on by the Big Pick.

More joy brought on by the Big Pick in L1082. This is the fill locus next to the Wall 1080 between this wall and the S baulk. We decided to take half of this locus and go down 10 cm with the big pick, then repeat the process on the other side. Then rinse and repeat with another 10 cm in the locus. That’s right, 20 cm in the locus today. We did do it 10 cm at a time so that we could stop if we found anything interesting, which we didn’t after 10 cm. So we continued down 10 cm more in the locus. There we found some rather interesting items that we should comment upon.

Near the S baulk, as well as near the W baulk we found an interesting base-like structure which was constructed of rocks about 20 cm long and 2 large pottery pieces of similar length. They were in a circular pattern of a diameter of about 23 cm. This was left in situ for the time being.

Near the end of the day, as we were big picking, we blasted through some dirt and brought up a large clod of dirt with white material upon it, which may have been a reed surface thing. This appeared only a small distance from the W baulk, actually coming out of the dirt right next to the baulk. We immediately stopped big picking over there, cleaned up, saved some of the reed stuff and brought it home as KT10 of this locus. We were able to get two rather large pieces and they are in a shoebox now as I type this.

So, as can be seen this was a relatively eventful day. We will continue this big picking strategy tomorrow and see what else pops up.

CM