We began our day today just southwest of Chili Gyol, working to confirm or eliminate two burials clusters there, one recorded in 2016, one in 2014. In the end, both were reinterpreted as bedrock formations and deleted from the database.
We then moved to the village of Chknagh, where we recorded the historical church, Tukh Manouk shrine, and cemetery, before informally walking the benches to the southeast of the village, recording nothing in terms of architecture and surface materials. We did collect some geological materials from the gorge there, potential iron or other metallic content material.
At the end of our day, we made a first attempt to drive into the mountain tops east and south of Saralanj village in order to groundtruth settlements we identified there in satellite imagery, and also to track down the fortress site of "Horomi Paler," which is allegedly also located in this area, north of the village of Chknagh. We did not get very high into the hills before needing to head back for the end of the work day, but we ascended far enough to examine an obsidian "mine" that our driver Samvel had mentioned was present in the area. The entire hillside was littered with chunky, unrounded obsidian cobbles, debitage, and artifacts. We did not climb up to the biggest apparent outcrops of obsidian, but we plan to do so in the future. It is not clear if the source is independent of the Damlik source--which may lie to the south and east--or if it is a new source. We will check that GIS data over the weekend.