Daily Trench Summary

Area D

Trench 5

August 8, 2002

Today we wanted to absolutely prepare the trench for the spider shot which got postponed from today to Saturday. To do this, Andrew continued on the burial in the far NW (L5135) and myself and a worker focused on trying to find a continuation of the Ubaid surface to the N now that the immediate pit problem had been dealt with.

Andrew’s work went well, and in some ways better than might be expected. The one great fear working with the skeleton was that one or possibly both legs rather than being flat actually plunged straight down causing the skeleton to have some 30-50 cm of vertical occupation. Though we knew since a couple days ago that this was not the case with the left leg, it also became clear today that the right leg, too, was merely flexed under the rib cage which makes excavation decidedly simpler. The other interesting find related to the skeleton is that tucked between the hips and the top of the right femur is a distinctively Late Chalcolithic rim sherd. In one way, this is disappointing because it would have been nice to tie the skeleton to the Ubaid context, but one really can’t ask for a better non-chronometric dating of the skeleton and tying the contexts was getting rather difficult, as will be explained below.

Things seemed relatively good at the beginning of the day for articulating the Ubaid surface further to the N. In fact, we ever encountered a few more fabric remnants (KT 5136.11). The floor, a packed earthen one mostly detectable by peeling the soil off where it wanted to come and catching the faint packed plant material on the negative was difficult but still possible to trace. However, like so many things in the N, it quickly became clear that it was cut by a pit or something similar (foundation trench possibly). In fact, another area of hard soil with thin ash deposits we had been tracing in hopes that it was the surface, as well, plunged about 30 centimeters and revealed itself to be a pit. Thus, we came to a point where the Ubaid surface wasn’t really traceable or, at least, what’s left of it won’t be for several more days, the burial is not in the same context and fragile materials to the S are still at risk. Thus we decided that we would get the plan shot of what we have and move on.

Once we get the plan shot, the idea is to start removing features to double-check our work. The grain surface, L5098, will be removed at and arbitrary 5 cm level with flotation and microanalysis samples taken from the four corners. Fire pit L5080, in the S of the grain surface and next to the N walls of the mudbrick structure will also, finally, be removed. The mudbrick walls themselves will be removed, in particular we want to confirm their relations. First we’ll peel the top layers of the N-S wall to try and determine its relation to S E-W wall L5104 and we’ll remove the W portion of the N E-W wall to try and trace the hard surface (which we currently believe was re-used in the currently exposed phase) further. After we’ve removed all this material we’ll do some brief excavations to look for more evidence of another phase, possibly put a 1 x 1 sounding in the SW corner to check for another phase and/or virgin soil/bedrock and we’ll shut down the trench. Basically, it would be good to know if there is another phase below the currently exposed one, but we don’t really have time left in the season (if this year’s work is any indication) to fully excavate another similarly preserved context. By my estimates we have 3-4 days left of work to be done in the trench.