Today we started working on the area to the east of the M3 in the Mirak area. We ran transect 23 between 9:45 - 11:15, starting at 443430 4496700 and heading north until hitting the dirt quarry at 443428 4498574, The transect wasn't very linear; I was stymied by two barley fields and then the Kasakh river gorge. When we restarted our transects on the north side of the gorge, we were in a field with a lot of exposed tuff, on which we all seemed to find some obsidian. (Mine was Ar/Mi.EF16.01, a flake with a percussion bulb.)
After this, Alan, Ian, and I went to a potentially medieval site on the east side of a tributary to the Kasakh (Mirak settlement 1). It has the fairly deep indentations in the rooms that Nigavan has (as opposed to Tsaghkahovit's precinct A, where the architecture was fairly even with the ground). Some of the walls appear doublefaced, but others do not.
There are some very interesting in-filled walls where stones of size similar to those on the face cobble the space between the two faces. These 'rock beds' are not evident everywhere that there are double faced walls, and I found them puzzling. I found one piece of ceramic, Ar/Mi.EF16.02, but it was on the south side of a ridge that appears to bound the settlement.
After this, we went to Melikgyugh, near the gold mine, to see whether some rock piles that Ian and Elizabeth Hardy had mapped two years ago were in fact burials. However, given that they appear to be very similar to rectilinear lines of field clearance, we ended up agreeing that they are not in fact ancient but are likely field clearance piles and/or associated with reforestation projects.