Welcome to the first blog posting for EFAP 2008 – Excavations at the Epipalaeolithic site of Kharaneh IV! We have just finished out first week of excavations in the eastern desert of Jordan (yeah!) and had a very successful few days, with some additional ‘adventures’, so to speak...
Everyone arrived safe and sound and ready to dig. We have settled into our huge and wonderful dig house in the oasis town of Azraq. We are living in a large building subdivided into four flats (one for eating/hanging out, one for lab work, one for a girls bedrooms, and one for a guys bedrooms) located in the western side, on a small hill, in north Azraq. We have a great view of the town and the nearby Azraq Castle, constructed entirely of black basalt stone, and a great view further west out into the desert. It has turned out to be a really great dig house, with lots of space. Having a separate flat for lab work really cuts down on the general house messiness.
We began the first week with a house full: myself, Matthew Jones, Andrew Graham, Danielle Macdonald, Alison Damick, Tovë Smith, Kelly Reed, Samantha Allcock, Louise and Joe Martin, Sue Colledge, Ibrahim Meselam, and Ismael Karaen, our cook (for those of from Wadi Ziqlab, yes, we do indeed have a cook! And he is excellent!). About half of us got to the dig house a few days prior to the start of excavations and were busy getting things organised. We rented mattresses, some dig supplies, sieves, fridge, stove, etc from the CBRL and hired a Diyana truck (a large box truck) to drive them to Azraq. That was an adventure in and of itself, but everything made it safe and sound. We have also been buying Azraq out of crazy plastic products – mostly patio furniture (this is our typical dig furniture, as it is inexpensive, light and easy to store and move), buckets (for moving dirt on-site), basins (for clothes and artefact washing), colanders (again for artefact washing), and shelving. I don’t think Azraq stores have ever sold so much plastic in one week before! Anyhow, the dig house is all decked out now, and looking good and quite comfortable, if I do say so myself. Joe, Louise’s son, is five years old and has been having great fun keeping us all amused during this first week, and keeping everything very light-hearted. In fact, he has proven to be quite a good little digger – I tried to offer him a job for the rest of the season saying I would py him in Fanta drinks (his favourite), but he was having none of it. Here are some pictures of Joe digging away on-site, and then crashing in the car ride home after a long day of digging and Fanta drinking...
I am attempting (with Andrew’s help) to maintain this blog for the excavations, and intend to update the site weekly. However, internet access in Azraq is sssooooooo slow, and I have yet to even get a computer there, so likely I will only be updating it on Fridays. This will likely replace my group emails, as I intend to keep it very informal and post what I would normally write in the group email anyways. Ok, now back to the work...
Our first day on site was Monday, May 26, and it was a bit of an adventure. We went to site bright and early for a little tour of the site and the immediately surrounding landscape. I also did some additional strategizing for my game plan for the next 6 weeks. After spending a few hours on site, having a look around, and then beginning to set our site benchmarks, datum, and grid, we decided to call it a day and make a wild and crazy attempt to go across the desert from Kharaneh to Wadi Jilat. In Wadi Jilat is another very large Epipalaeolithic site, like Kharaneh, located only 24 km to the south of us. Although many have made this trip before, it was not meant to be for us that day! It takes about an hour to drive to in the rough and rocky terrain (driving over a sharp limestone and flint pavement). Two of our specialists, Louise and Sue, dug there in the late 80's, so we were hoping for a grand tour from them (and re-visit for them). However, on this sharp flinty pavement in the middle of nowhere, one of the vehicles got a flat tire... Myself, Andree, Danielle, Alison, and Tovë had stayed behind a little longer on-site setting our site benchmark. We had just set out in the pick-up truck to meet the other vehicle en-route, when Matt called to tell us they had taken a little detour and got stuck with a flat tire. So, we modified our course to help change the tire. We were driving cross-country up and down lots of wadis and ridges to get to them, many ridge with great views from the top (see the photo of Danielle, Andrew, Tovë, and Alison)! But, choosing the right ‘road’ to come up and down was a little harry sometimes (most of the ‘roads’ are dirt tracks made by trucks driving in and out of rock quarries, and I’m pretty sure they did not always pick the best place to drive). However, with my fancy new GPS and Andrew’s superior driving skills (and the fact that we drove up the highest ridge we could find to look around for the truck), we had no problems getting to them. After Andrew and Matt changed the tire (being the only ‘men’ on the crew, they jumped all over the task...some pics included here), we had lunch out in the desert and decided, rather than continuing with only one spare left over seriously pointy ground, we would turn back and try another day...good thing too because we already had another flat tire on the way back to Kharaneh as the spare was already punctured and slowly leaked as we drove back. It was completely flat by the time we got to Qasr Kharaneh (a large caravanserai just a few hundred metres from our site) and the paved road. Weirdly, this was our third flat tire in two days!!! We had already had a first flat tire the day before when Andrew and Danielle drove out to join us from Amman - and used one of our spare tires for that. Now, we had two flats (well, one flat, and one already punctured spare). Matt and Andrew, manly-men that they proved themselves to be, are now quite efficient at changing flats. In fact, we are thinking of hiring them out for the Nascar circuit. For this last tire change though, since we had run out of spares and were still in the middle of nowhere (Qasr Kharaneh is by the side of the desert road to Azraq and a half hour from the nearest petrol station, mechanic, or tire repair shop), we had to drive into Azraq, have the tires repaired (no new ones were to be had for our truck), then drive back out again, change the flat, then drive both trucks to Azraq - a long first day! We all drank beer afterwards!
The next day we began by removing backfill, and windblown and slumped sediment from two old excavation trenches, and wow, the sediments were full of cool things! We spent two and a half days sorting out the boundaries of the old trenches and planning where to dig next - but during this time we decided to sieve it all to start a reference collection of surface material and material from the backdirt and slumped areas (all material with insecure contexts). Already in 3 days we found hundreds of flint tools, lots of butchered and burnt animal bone, along with denticulated mother-of-pearl shell, other Mediterranean shell beads (mostly dentalium), and several very nice pieces of worked bone. They generally are long bone fragments with parallel lines incised into them perpendicular to the long axis of the bone. Two pieces have an interesting pattern to the lines: four incised lines, space, four incised lines, space, four incised lines, space, then six incised lines (then the fragments are broken). Might not sound all that exciting here, but trust me - it is awesome! Stay tuned for pictures of these... Hopefully, these are a sign of lots more good things to come!
Ok, this is a little short today (our first day off), but we are in Amman with lots of shopping and running around to do...
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