This was the first day of the season during which I was in charge of setting transects. Ian was working with Arsho and the drones, so I organized the transect walking across the southern edge of Nigavan village, east to the Kasakh, and began walking pieces of the northermost Nigavan quadrant areas between the Kasakh, the village, and the Chili bog.
Transects between our western survey edge and the Kasakh River encountered a number of associated corrals or less likely settlement building, constructed from the numerous large boulders strewn across the local landscape (Ar/Ni.AEC16.12, Ar/Ni.AC16.22, Ar/Ni.AG16.16, Ar/Ni.SAB16.19, Ar/Ni.SAB16.20). Several of them stand at 2 and 3 courses tall and extensive mapping would be needed to produce a picture of the entire complex.
Transects closer to the Nigavan and M3 roads were rather unproductive, encountering a rather disturbed landscape, irrigation infrastructure, etc. A single interesting area of note was at the northern edge of the 2014 Aparan survey quadrant, just east of the Kasakh, where we found a very dense distribution of lithic debitage (obsidian) across an area of the river terrace that had been scraped down to bedrock (Ar/Ni.SAB16.26, Ar/Ni.AG16.29). There were both black tuff and basalt deposits here, so the scraping may have been related to tuff collection.