Daily Trench Journal

Area H, Trench 2

May 25, 2005

M. Baldi

After cleaning the trench I took a couple of photos before beginning with today’s plan to push further deeper into the trench before we can best say what the overall plan will be. The reason for this pre-amble refers to the lack of finding good contexts to work with. This may be an issue of geography and location, meaning usage of this particular piece of ground in an earlier time. It is difficult then to say what that might have been without seeing those contexts. As we are excavating the area of Locus 7 it continues fairly bare without much of cultural indications. I decided to leave Locus 9 alone for now but moved to divide the trench in two and dig for now the Eastern half of the trench in order to accelerate the removal of fill over a smaller area. This approximately 2 meter wide area will then be excavated rapidly looking for those good contexts. I hope to be down another one half meter today. As we were proceeding with this work a hard brick like object in the middle of Locus 7 began surfacing and soon began to appear like an oven had been found. The area had a preponderance of small calcareous pebbles, they were white and of a substance similar to chalk. These pebbles have been located at Kenan Tepe in association with two distinct locations, one is at virgin soil level (and in areas with re-deposited virgin soil), but the other is floors and other surfaces, which may have been plastered. While carefully looking for the markers we identified a floor and a well lined but thin layer of whitish material o the baulk at the same level as what we were removing. Dr. Parker confirmed this feature, which we believe to be a surface upon a visit to the trench. This surface was designated with a new locus number: Locus 10. While the area with the oven markers was designated as Locus 11. This area is roughly 0.70 by 0.60 meters. Within this locus we located a nice fragment of pottery with a good rim and a spout identified as possibly Chalcolithic in date. This piece will receive its own KT number (KT # 40) and while collected with the rest of the material from this locus will be kept separate for drawing and photographing. As these loci were collected I changed locus number and designated the new fill below the floor (Locus 10) as Locus 12 and continued excavating it.   

The workers today were: Cengiz Ildeniz (10), Siddik Cicek (7.5), Idris Yilmaz (6.5), and Burhan Bozcali (6).