Our work at Aragatsi Berd today focused on continued descent west and east of our N-S LB architecture in AB4, mapping of the site's surface architecture, and photo taking after several days of poor weather and early departures due to rain.
In locus 38, the excavations directly west of the LB N-S wall, we continued another 5cm pass, only to come down rather immediately on an in situ EB(2) floor, with flattened vessels, flat limestone insets, and a floor matrix that consisted of silty clay and with numerous andesite pebble inclusions. We are cleaning the floor and exposing it south to north. No tools identified yet, just vessels.
Ruben Badalyan and Adam Smith visited the site (along with Maureen Marshall and Hannah Chazin) to view this first in situ EB deposit and Ruben recommended a small southern extension to clarify the architectural organization of the walls that meet in SW AB4.
In this portion of the trench, cleaning work exposed that instead of a single curvilinear wall, there may be three wall segments that meet in this operation corner: (1) the W-E locus 4 wall first identified in 2008, (2) the N-S wall segment that stretches across almost all of trench west, and (3) a tiny glimpse of a segment that may define the western boundary of the next room to the south. Ruben's recommendation makes a lot of sense and we may open this 1x5 SW extension tomorrow.
To the east of the LB N-S wall, we continued to pull stones and expand loci 39 and 35 towards one another and the possible burial at trench center. The matrix continues to turn siltier and simplify in terms of pebble and cobble content as we remove approximately 2-3 levels of wall fall.
Mapping work completed most of the needed south side activities and began to record western slope architecture.