Daily Trench Journal

Area D

Trench 8

June 18, 2005

E.O.

Today we took out my meticulously articulated walls with big picks. The walls that we have spent the past two weeks working on are now gone. We did our best to preserve as much of the level where we saw the other (new) walls as possible however we were not bale to do so in the far north east of the trench were the inside areas had been taken down deep. I believe that most of these areas were two courses or brick deep as opposed to other section of wall where we only had one preserved. Possibly this was a step down process because of the slope of the Tepe.

We were able to gain a lot of information about the walls as we took them out. I was able to pull several bricks and confirm my belief about brick size.

Because we wanted to keep the red brick wall we only peeled off the outermost row of bricks in wall L65/73 (it is the same wall but ended up as two different loci because of how we excavated it.) To do this the guys were able to insert a flat shovel between the rows of bricks and pop of the outermost row. This row came off in sheets almost a meter long. This confirmed my original ideas that the bricks in that wall were a meter long. This may mean that when the wall was made the bricks were very wet and so bonded. I was also able to learn that walls L71 and 84 were not made at the same time as the larger wall L73 and L65. We know this because of how easily these walls separated from each other. It is my belief that all the other walls (L70, 71, 72) were made at different time than the large wall; most likely they were made afterward.

Also in the northeast section we pulled out lots of pottery. This included one large shard fro ma large bowl which was painted and one large rim shard with the classic ubaid rim. These may have been just under the wall or in the wall. I believe that they were just under the walls. I also had to start pottery brags for L73 because we were coming up with pottery lithics and bone as we took out that wall. All these items may have been under the walls and not in them. One item that we did find as we were taking out a section if wall L70 was a small three footed bowl. It came out of the same section of the wall where the burial was.

Once the walls themselves had been taken out our next step was to scrape the entire trench flat and look for new walls. We were able to see several new walls but we are waiting for the entire trench to dry out before we make decisions.