Weekly Trench Summary

Area D

Trench 5

Week Ending July 14, 2002

Work until now has focused on, firstly, cleaning the baulks and preparing the trench for proper excavation and, subsequently, beginning excavation. The latter has focused almost entirely on getting the entire trench down to the apparent surface level of the southern mudbrick structure. This was necessary as, due to its uncovering late last season, the rest of the trench had not been equally excavated due to time constraints.

Once work commenced we were instantly beset by good and interesting contexts. This first occurred in the central portion of the trench against the W baulk with L5079 which contained many excellent diagnostic pot sherds which, upon preliminary investigation, indicate an Ubaid context. Originally this locus was thought to be a surface but as work continued my opinion has change to that it was part of a jumbled collapse of material from shelves on a wall or something similar. This would help explain the presence of many flat-lying sherds but none of them ever being on quite the same plane. Though natural shifting of material could also explain this there are a couple reasons I do not believe such to be the case.

The first is the extraordinary find of a decomposed (but extant) piece of fabric in the same context, which looks to have been wrapped around or perhaps caught between mubricks. Some good samples of it exist as KT 5094.8, 5094.23, 5094.24, 5094.25, 5064.31, 5094.35, 5094.39 and 5094.40. Further, this is all lying above a crushed, decomposed grain surface (L5098) which, in L5103, is clearly shown to be associated with some of the highly diagnostic black-on-white painted pottery (and in turn with the mudbrick structure which the grain material looks to be stacked up against). There is another concentration of the grain at a higher level, L5095, which also seems associated. Notably, all these above-grain contexts have been turning out huge numbers of obsidian sickle blades which leads me to believe this was some sort of grain depot or semi-enclosed storage structure attached to the N end of the mudbrick structure proper.

Other notable finds include a loom weight, KT 5098.14, a spindle whorl, KT 5511, a mostly in tact small animal (probably rodent) skeleton, KTs 5522 and 5531 and a second spindle whorl, KT 5094.47.

In the northern and eastern parts of the trench things still remain unclear despite extensive excavation. Several pits (L5102, L5081, L5082, L5083 and L5059) serve to confuse and mix the material and it is also entirely possible that in the far NE we are still dealing with surface tumble. This is a shame because some excellent pot sherds, bases and stands were recovered from L5084.