Today, the survey team began our day in Mirak, where we started to remove the tall grass from around the western fortress wall and western citadel, in preparation for opening Operation 03 against the eastern face of the wall, a 2x2m trench. Operation 02 continues to uncover bedrock in the "room" exterior and rocks are being pulled as much as possible throughout the trench.
We then proceeded to Nigavan to work on groundtruthing of monuments list sites, including two churches (current and Medieval) and two cemeteries. The 13-14th century church Djamategh () ruins were particularly interesting, consisting of a small single nave church where 4-5 courses of masonry were standing, with a wide assortment of different size blocks. The associated cemetery is quite large and intensively filled with tombs.
We then proceeded to the Lusagyugh quad to collect the first drone imagery of Aver Berd. We painted 5 ground control points at different elevations throughout the site and collected the imagery across 4 RGB flights. At the same time Karen and Chris collected obsidian cobbles from Tsaghki Dzor below the fortress, where we also took a GPS point to record the location.