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Code
CS17.09
Season
2017
Narrative

Today was dedicated to transecting the foothill about 1 km due east of Mirak fortress. There had been a kurgan cluster recorded there in 2014 but after further inspection we agreed to downgrade it to, most likely, a cluster of stones set aside by either farmers or, in a more hopeful scenario, they were collections of stones gathered to incorporate into a potential corral used by pastoralists who brought cattle right up to the edge of the Tsakunyats. The latter hypothesis makes sense to me because for a distance of about 2 km there are about 4 corrals that virtually line up in a row against the mountains. The destroyed walls we looked at in the area seem to agree with this idea. If we employ the corral idea then these sites would most likely be EB pastoralist sites, although there have not been any ceramics located here to narrow a periodization. If we delete all the kurgan cluster sites and focus on interpreting these areas as solely used as EB animal corrals, it would reinforce the idea that animals were brought up into a higher elevation to graze before being taken back down to settlements. This is why I think the settlement site Ar/Mi.ICL14.11 can't be anything earlier than medieval. It's far too close to (possibly designated) corralling zones. These 4 corrals are at least 1.5 to 2 km away and it just doesn't seem to line up spatially, assuming they are EB. If they are medieval, then that's not something I can really weigh in on.

Other than the shifting in approach to interpreting the corrals, not much else emerged from today's transecting.