Weekly Trench Summary

Area D

Trench 5

Week Ending August 4, 2002

This was a shortened week in the trench due to the 2-day holiday in Urfa.

Following the baulk reduction, we focused on two things primarily this week. The first was the continued following of the Ubaid context as far as possible into the pit-dominated North. This was done with success up to the areas of clearly extant partially or unexcavated pits. However, in the NW is looks as though we have finally gotten through the huge plaster-lined pit which dominated that region. The current focus in that portion of the trench is the connection between the Ubaid contexts and the skeleton.

"The skeleton" is a human skeleton we uncovered mid-week. It is in a peculiar position, possibly on its knees, face down with its arms behind its back or at its sides. Not a common burial position. This leaves us with the question of, if it isn’t a burial is it someone tossed to the bottom of a pit or, if we’re below the pits, is it someone who got caught in the same Ubaid collapse with caught all the grain and fabric to preserve it so well. We hope to answer these questions in the coming week.

The other area of focus was the large E-central oven. Other than its size, the primary remarkable feature of the oven is that it contains some interior architecture—a semi-circle of mudbrick with extreme concentrations of ash within. The current theory is that this is a firebox of some sort. The other feature of the oven is that by cutting a section into its wall this week we found no foundation between the grain surface and the oven proper, suggesting it is either contemporary with or predates the grain surface.

Also of note is that we uncovered a foundation trench for last season’s house-attached SE oven and it is founded higher than the other but appears to be contemporary, something which, combined with the grade of the grain surface, indicates the construction may be on a natural slope.