Search
Log In
Code
SB17.31
Season
2017
Narrative

Today we returned to Berdichainer in the morning to drone the site and to shoot in our control points with the GNSS. We were able to shoot them all in using only two base points. However, we decided to move the 8th point from the rock we had painted to a more visible rock. Chris and I also spent about an hour cleaning the pit we had poked in a little yesterday. This revealed more sherds, a piece of baked clay, a bone, and a broken obsidian flake. It seems none of the sherds were very diagnostic however. We stopped in Aragats to eat lunch at a Xinkalinots rumored to be the best in the valley. After lunch, we ground truthed a very new looking Tukh Manuk chapel in the village and near by a church which was said to have been built in 1915. However, when I asked the woman at the church she told us the church was built in 1832, restored in 2014, and that the Khatchkars in the courtyard were quite old and had been brought over from western Armenia when the current population immigrated from a few villages there (Including Mush according to a monument we found). Finally, we ground truthed two cemeteries that were in the village and rather close to each other. The first was the more modern one, which is still in use. The second was the original cemetery the village used when the current population first arrived at this location in 1828, according to a local man named Arsho. According to Arsho there were two older villages in this area both further up the slope of Aragats whose populations moved to Aragats village due to the harsh winters. These villages were called Jamshlu and Khrbek. There is perhaps more ground truthing to be done in this area, but I suspect tomorrow we will be doing some transects in the area as well.