Daily Trench Summary

Area D

Trench 5

July 31, 2002

Several important matters were cleared up today. Firstly, the oven within the S-mudbrick house still exists to some extent, though the reason for it not being filled with ash and the usual oven material at this depth is unclear. What is clear is the nice circular line in the soil. This also means that a little surface fragment uncovered inside the house has a sensible location, if we are to assume it was built up against the oven wall. This only leaves the matter of whether the S wall is contemporary or even extant to the fore. I will try and look into that tomorrow.

Secondly, we took some time to make a section in a small portion of the wall of central-E oven L5111 to see if there was a foundation trench between it and the grain the presumption being that if there was, it was a later feature. The contrary was found, however, which means the oven should be either contemporary with or earlier than the grain surface. Also in that oven we uncovered some interior architecture, a half-circle of mudbricks with extreme concentrations of very ashy dark soil within (L5126). It is quite possible that this feature is actually the firebox of the oven. Elsewhere in the oven, it looks like we may have come to the bottom. We are going to take a spider-shot of the oven tomorrow.

L5100 was brought to its final extent in the central portion of the trench, and now goes until it is cut by pits. In the northwest it appears that we have finally gotten below the pits, which leads us to our wild card of the day!

We have begun to uncover an articulated human skeleton in the far NW of the trench. It appears to be below the pits which would, though we haven’t yet traced this context, probably associate it with Ubaid-period contexts. The odd feature about the skeleton is that it appears to be in a face-down, coiled-up position. One theory is that we might actually have the remains of a person actually caught in a collapse. However, the testing of this theory will have to wait a couple days because of the annoying but simple fact that half of the skeleton is in the baulk. After weighing our options of leaving the skeleton, taking out what we had easy access to and leaving the rest, waiting until D7 gets to a level where we could fully excavate (circa 4 seasons), tunneling into the baulk, and, finally, bringing the baulk down once more, we chose the final option. Given the possible contextual information that could be gained from the skeleton and its surroundings we determined it should be excavated. Cutting back a portion of the baulk was the only acceptable option following that decision as due to the amount of the skeleton that could be in the baulk and the latter’s general instability, tunneling wasn’t feasible or safe.

So, towards the end of the day we got started on cutting back the baulk in the areas which look to possibly be included in the burial some two meters below. Prior to cutting the baulk, though, we covered the exposed portions of the skeleton as best we could by building a sandbag wall, placing a metal sheet on top with further sandbags and a tarp above that and, on the skeleton itself, putting foil compartments over the more fragile portions. Of note, there is some rodent gnawing on the right arm of the skeleton.