Today we began the process of removing the backfill from last season from the central and western chambers in Kurgan 2. Maureen Marshall and Levon Aghikiyan were working with me today.The backfilled chambers appear to be in good condition and undisturbed. Maureen spent the morning defining the edges of where we had laid down plastic in the western chamber. A small piece of bone was removed from the backfill and was bagged as Locus 100. In the central chamber, we are using shovels to remove the backfill dirt.
Just after lunch, we had exposed almost all of the plastic in the western chamber. We removed the plastic, exposing the in situ vessels (Locus 24, 25, 26) and the skeletal remains (Locus 32) and photographed them. We then began to remove the vessel (Locus 26) in the W corner of the W chamber. We took a soil sample (Locus 101) from the center of the vessel. While taking this sample, Maureen uncovered a pig humerus, which was laying on top of a very large sherd. There was a similar situation in the western chamber of K1. Due to this, we did not completely removed Locus 26.
I began to remove the whole vessel (Locus 24) from the center of the W chamber. It turns out that both Locus 24 and 25 are censers. The process of cleaning and removing the vessel exposed the rim of another vessel at a lower level at the center of the southern edge of the western chamber. As the censer appears to continue down into the unexcavated portions of the chamber, we only collected part of Locus 24.
In the central chamber we reached the level of the plastic and then removed it, leaving the skeleton covered until tomorrow. It seemed to be in relatively good condition, though some of the bones were broken. The large mammal skull in the southern part of the chamber is quite fragmented at this point. For the rest of the afternoon, we continued to clean near the wall in the northern portion of the central chamber.