Daily Trench Journal

Area F

Trench 1

July 11, 2001

And so we write the journal of the day known affectionately on the Tepe as Diyarbakir day eve. This journal will talk about two more fun and delightful areas of focus in our trench. Today we started from the area known as Locus 1067 in our trench and began to push down towards the west and towards the north baulks. The area we began to excavate towards the North baulk we gave the locus of 1072. This locus was going pretty good, but as we were excavating we noticed that we were beginning to hit into a redder area than the rest of the fill of this locus. A thorough cleaning showed that we were hitting upon a wall. This wall is actually a bit higher in the trench than the other wall 1069 we had hit upon. This new wall we named 1073.

On the other side of the trench we had named the entire far western meter and a half of the trench locus 1071. This locus was not taken off all at one time, but the fill that we were going through all appeared to be of the same consistency, brown dirt, which was not too soft or too hard, indicating the absence of pits and walls and the existence of a general fill. This area we took down in increments of five centimeters, starting at the south baulk and working our way towards the North baulk. Over near the north baulk, .9 meters from the west baulk and .9 meters from the north baulk we ran into a very interesting piece of pottery. This appeared to be a nearly complete potsmash, which was laying on a surface in the trench. We spent the day attempting to take the entire locus down to the lower level of the potsmash, but ran out of time after some great hard work. We did not remove the potsmash today, but will remove that on the 13th when we get back from Diyarbakir. Also in the locus were some good pottery diagnostic sherds. Let us remember that this particular locus is a good locus for Bradley to look at for pottery identification purposes.

CM