Weekly Trench Summary

Week 4

Area C

Trench 1

July 22, 2002

In this week of excavation we started to get some new kinds of pottery that had not been seen in this area before. It is beginning to look like this second millennium area might actually be from the third millennium. Further excavation will hopefully shed more light on this.

The beginning of this week focused on the mudbrick surfaces of 1071 and 1083, working to an area below the walls that were built on top of them. The mudbrick continues, so they are possibly earlier mudbrick architectural features that were built upon for the later walls.

The trench is still a bit confusing with lines appearing in the trench floor everywhere, so 1085 will take down this confusion hopefully and get us clear information about what is going on here.

Two interesting features emerged this week, 1087 (a mudbrick surface of narrow bricks) and 1092 (a possible wall of stones laid on top of pot shards). 1087 is a slightly curving mudbrick surface (or possible collapse) of narrow mudbricks just to the west of 1083. The westernmost edge contains two courses of darker gray bricks with a light mortar. 1092 is an interesting feature of large squarish or rectangular stones laid on top of large pottery fragments that appear to be laid upon other stones. Possibly this is part of an outside surface where a great deal of smoke could easily be dissipated (possibility based on great concentration of carbon and ash on this side). There is also a visible line in the trench base that might indicate an outside and an inside surface.