Daily Journal
Area E, Trench 2
June 21st, 2005
J. Henecke
We finished leveling the southwestern half of the trench yesterday afternoon, and
quickly outlined the visible walls using nails and string. This morning, I closed locus 132
and 112, and opened up loci 136-144 in their place. L136 is the area of grayish fill in the
west corner, between the L134 surface and the mudbrick wall feature. L137 is the interior
of the one clearly visible cell room, and L138 is the small sealed pit that cuts through this
room and its western wall. A second pit cuts the southern corner, but after excavating
L139, I am unconvinced that this was a true pit. L140 is fill in the south corner, cut by pit
L105 and beneath surface L133, and L141 is the fill beneath L112. L142 is the mudbricks
to the east of the three walls that enclose the cell room (L143). Similarly, on the western
end, L144 is a grouping of mudbricks without a defined shape at the moment.
I began the morning with the aim of clarifying the area to the east of the cell room
structure. This required me to cut a section out of L105, in order to get a view of L142,
while also scrapping a few centimeters from L141 and 142. I succeeded in bringing L141
to the level of the L115 pit, but it appears that this area is still highly disturbed by either
erosion or pit activity. As in L142, there is evidence for mudbrick walls and debris, but
we are unable to derive any conclusions from this area. It seems that a line with pottery
imbedded in it, in L142, is a pit with mudbricks inside it, and I believe this entire area
was a continuation of the mudbrick structure that has been disturbed by later activities.
As a result of these conclusions, I will leave off the excavation o f this area until next
season, and concentrate on the surface locus to the north of wall L114/116 and the
articulation of the cell room structure.
I sifted the entire L134 surface and kept a 3 L soil sample, in addition to the 9 L HAP
sample I took yesterday. The surface itself was a total of 196 L. It covered the entire area
north of L116/114, except for pit L127 and a small area of lighter soil around the pit. The
floor was easily excavated and contained a lot of pottery and lithics with very little soil.
There was evidence for a white and pinkish plaster in some areas. In many ways, this
surface resembled the previous L118 surface, and I believe that this suggests continuity in
the area. There was more evidence for domestic activity, including another mortar stone,
and I kept a lot of stone fragments, which may be resource material for lithic production.
In general, this locus supplied a large quantity of lithic debris, and it would be beneficial
to determine the proportion of lithics in E2 loci with other areas of the tepe. The surface
was fairly thin, and beneath it is a spread of medium and large stones. I believe this may
represent another surface or a production area above a surface.
Given that there are only two days of excavation left after this in the 2005 field season,
my other goal is to articulate the walls we found after spraying the trench, so that we can
produce an architectural plan. Although neither area is particularly interesting in itself, I
excavated a few centimeters from both L136 and 140 in order to make the outline of the
outside walls more visible. The cell room is composed of three new walls to the south,
west and east, while L116 is the northern wall of this structure. I kept this wall as a
separate locus and designated the other three as L143. I also assigned separate loci to the
western and eastern mudbrick features because I am not sure how they relate to this
room nor if they are true walls or debris. I cleared pit L139, which was marked by a
line in the soil, but during excavation was both shallow and fairly hard for a pit. The
soil was of a darker brown color than the rest of L140, but I was unable to make any
further conclusions. I also removed L138, which cuts the cell room. Unfortunately, since
it was a sealed pit, there were few remains within t he soil matrix, which was an
undistinguished medium grained brown sand. This pit explains why it was difficult t o
make a connection between wall sections in the western end, since it cuts through the
bricks.
Finally, I began to excavate L137, the room’s interior. In the morning, one of the
workmen unintentionally broke through the surface after stepping on a hollow spot.
There w as initially only a few pot sherds visible in this pit, and we thought it might be an
animal burrow. After excavating about 30 centimeters from L137, we were able to
remove the soil overlying this feature (L146). Within the fairly deep pit is a large broken
jar – which was probably broken when we found the pit. We are unable to see the
contents of the jar if there are any, and tomorrow, we will bring L137 down further, and
then excavate L146 as a pit. The soil matrix of L137 contained traces of organic
pseudomorph, and as with other cell rooms this is probably residue from g rain storage
and periodic sweeping. The pseudomorphs seem to lie in vertical striations, but they are
very ephemeral and difficult to trace.