Kenan Tepe

Trench C6

July 21, 2004

Daily Journal

Trench C6 is located on the northwestern side of the tell where it begins to slope up from the valley to the top of the tell. We began trench C6 today in hopes of catching the wall from C5 that we uncovered in 2002. The remote sensing data showed a diagonal line going from C5 to the NE and our 8m E-W, 1m N-S trench is placed directly over and at an oblique angle to this anomoly. The slope in this area goes down quite a bit E-W, and we began by removing topsoil along the natural elevation of the hill. Below topsoil we identifed three new loci: L2 (clayey, reddish soil in the western 5m of the trench), L3 (possible wall in the east-middle of the trench, which turned out to be only eroded occupational debris), and L4 (occupational debris in the eastern 2-3m of the trench. We excavated initial levels in L2, 3 and 4 along the natural slope of the hill. After a first 15cm level we determined no difference between L3 and L4, so we merged them, leaving us L2 in the western 5m and L4 in the easter 3m. We continued excavating these loci and attempted to ‘level’ the trench by digging to the same level W-E. This means we dug much further into L4 than L2. In fact we overdug L2 and chopped a fair way into the clayey soil below it. L4 also began to change from a reddish-brown clayey (like ‘virgin’) soil with white limestone bits, to a mix of this clay and more pure green and yellow clay. This latter clay often contains bits of natural iron (collected L4 KT4). We found similar clay on the eastern side of the wall in C5 in year 2002, so hopefully we will find the wall somewhere between L4 and L2 tomorrow. The material below L4 will be named L5, and the material below L2 will be named L6.

L1, 3, and 4 contained a mix of middle bronze pottery and some early bronze age forms. The latter are surely coming up from lower loci. L1, 3 and 4 also contained some grindstones, slag, and bones. Once we get very far into L2 and the material below L4, bones, grindstones and such are scarce where as EB pottery continues in reasonably significant amounts.

Note: the steep W-E slope resulted in some odd elevation combinations. Despite our best efforts, sometimes the meter stick did not get placed in the same spot at the base as the top of a locus. Due to the steep slope, even a difference of just 20-40 cm from the original elevation reading point resulted in widely varying elevations. To remedy this problem we began to level the trench (which creates the new problem of cutting horizontally into natural layers, ama ney yapalim).

Workers today:

Suleyman Yurtas

A guy from Sibel

Tarkan and another guy from Baris

Missy’s two guys