Our sunday operation at Gegharot didn't prove to be as simple as anticipated...In the process of cleaning, recording, and removing the burial situated in locus 18, we encountered a second skull. It seems under locus 13 we didn't simply have the scattered remains of a single individual. Given the presence of additional longbones we opted to leave the remains in situ and continue to clean and record today (monday). While this has slowed progress in that corner of the unit it is pretty damn interesting! Given the total lack of LB pottery, it seems that what we have here is two EB individuals situated outside the capstone. Since we are fortunate enough to have a surplus of mandibles (and teeth), therein lies the possibility to date those outside in comparison to those situated within the tomb.
To the north of the remains we continued to clean. It seems possible that we have an east west wall -- although this could also be collapse. Hopefully further cleaning will elucidate if we are dealing with another architectural feature or if we just have ourselves another mess to clean prior to opening the burial. Drone photos have given us an excuse to clean the unit at large. We are slowly working from south to north cleaning out stones in locus 16/ 18. In so doing we hope to further trace the wall and come to terms with the chronology of events in this unit. If the wall underlies L18, it would seem that the burial construction was built directly on top of it.
Needless to say, we have our work cut out for us in the next few weeks.