Kharaneh IV 2009 - Week Four

Well, Week 4 has already started very well! Today we are back at site after a bit of a chaotic weekend – half the crew went to Umm Qais and Umm al-Jimal for a lovely day of touring Roman sites. The rest of us went to Madaba, which was largely relaxing, except for poor Chris, who suffered from some tummy bug and had to make a trip to the hospital overnight. All is well now and he is well again, but we will have to test all his food for him first, just in case!

Anyways, we had a very good first day on site and in the lab. In Area A we came down on the surface in a few new squares and have now achieved some very nice horizontal exposure of the surface. However, Area B had the big excitement of the day (ok, excitement if you are really into prehistoric archaeology, otherwise, maybe not so much). On Thursday, we uncovered, documented, and excavated an Early EP hearth – which was exciting in and of itself (they are still quite rare to find). Today, while cleaning up around the hearth and attempting to continue excavating these squares, we discovered another possible hearth underneath and, in fact, are now beginning to be able to sort out a number of grey, dark brown, and black stains in this area that seem to be a series of overlapping hearths, each new one placed slightly offset from the one before so that over time the hearths appear to migrate to the southeast.













In the lower of the exposed hearths currently being excavated we discovered two very large chunks of charred material which turned out to be completely burned, but still articulated, gazelle horn cores sticking straight up from the fire! As we discovered last year, things are really happening in Area B, but it will also take us quite a long time and painstaking excavation to sort out.

In the lab Sam, who is working on the shell from Kharaneh for her Masters dissertation, discovered that a) the 2 mm fraction from flotation is full of dentalium shell beads and b) the 1 mm fraction from flotation in certain contexts of Area B is full of fish bones. These are very small bones from very small fish (likely the Kill fish – the only endemic fish to Azraq) that were either brought to the site from Azraq or from a nearby lake. More on this as it develops…

Excavation of the first hearth in Area B has been taking some time this week – the preservation is amazing and the hearth material is really full of charcoal and other burnt material. In order to fully expose and remove the hearth sediments with minimal disturbance (it gets quite windy on site and the hearth sediments are quite amenable to blowing away), we had a crack team of Toby, Danielle, Jen E and myself stay out one afternoon to deal with it. It was a long and hot afternoon, but extremely rewarding. Aside from the hearth excavation, adjacent to it we excavated the complete and fully articulated four paws of a small canid (just paws, nothing else?). The preservation was absolutely amazing – many of the foot bones for each foot remained attached when excavated! In addition, later this week in Area B, Toby and Alison were working on our deep trench continuing from last year and discovered several nice bone tools and another well-preserved hearth.

In Area A, Danielle and her crew have been continuing to expose and map a compact surface, a feat complicated by the continued appearance of enigmatic brown circular stains in the sediment that contain high densities of burnt flint and bone in their fill. We are just now exposing, mapping, and excavating them and hope to be able to solve their mystery soon.

In Area C (actually, I’m not sure if I have mentioned Area C before, but it is a new exploratory square in between Areas A and B where we are trying to connect up the stratigraphy between the two main areas), we have spent most of this week excavating virtually sterile deposits (well, sterile for Kharaneh)! We have hit a couple of distinct clay layers that contain almost no bone or lithics, and the bone that is present is mostly turtle carapace. It is possible that we have hit lake deposits, but only time and lab work (and Matt) will tell…

This week we were also very happy to have Leslie and Phil visit us again, even if only briefly, to take a little tour of some local sites. And, on Tuesday night we had a little party at the dig house with our neighbours – the team of April Nowell, Carlos Cordova, and Michael Bisson, who were just finishing up their work on some Middle Palaeolithic sites in the North Azraq Druze Marsh. Ismael worked his wonders with the BBQ and baked us a cake to help celebrate their end-of-season (we still have two weeks to go, but are always looking for a reason to celebrate!).

Well, now it is the mid-dig break (a little late, I know). About a third of our crew have headed down to Petra for the break, a few have headed over to Jerusalem, and I am headed up north to Ziqlab to catch up with everyone there. Now, we are off to relax for a few days…

Kharaneh IV 2009 - Week Three

Well actually, the beginning of week 3 was the last day of our Azraq Workshop, during which the crew had a lab day again. Sunday was our first day back at site with a full crew (including us) and it was back to digging as usual. Actually, a full crew is about 12 people. We are divided into a field crew and a lab crew daily, partly because there is only so many people we can accommodate in the field to excavate at one time with so many contiguous units open at one time, and partly because we need people back at the field lab every day working on the material we collected the day before. So, now that we are digging good deposits everywhere, we are doing virtually 100% flotation (washing the excavated material through very fine meshes to collect the fine (and floating) bits of plant material that will help us reconstruct the ancient vegetation at the site and what foods the people living there may have eaten or used). We are getting a lot of charcoal from the site, which when identified will tell us about what types of trees were growing nearby and being used by people for fuel.

The excavations are also now going really well. In Area A, we have exposed the compact surface is all but a few excavation squares. In these other squares, quite interesting things are coming up so that it is taking longer than planned to get them down to the compact surface. The first of these interesting things is and area that Pat and Abby have been excavating that contains a large circular concentration of ashy silts with large chunks of charcoal. The other is an area that Chris has been excavating that contains several post-holes. These likely indicate the remains of either a structure or some related installation, such as a stand over a hearth for cooking. In any case, post-holes are extremely rare in the Epipalaeolithic period and we are quite happy to be able to confirm that those reported by Muheisen while excavating there in the 1980’s do continue at the same elevation and alignment from his old trench. As a side note, we just want to point out that Chris has been wearing his hat while excavating and he had not been sunburned once!

In Area B things are, of course, much more complicated. Steve has finally sorted out and excavated several weird pit features and disturbed areas to the north.

While in the south, Rowena, Jen E and Caroline have come down on a very nice occupation surface in one part of the trench and, by yesterday, a very nice hearth to the south.

It is now Friday and I am by the side of the pool as a write this, enjoying the high life in Madaba. Kevin, Isaac and Seiji and have come down from Ziqlab too. Now, back to relaxing…enjoy the pics!

Here are some pics taken from Azraq Workshop mentioned in the last post. The first six pictures where taken by Barbara Porter (ACOR).

Kharaneh IV 2009 - Week Two

Another week in Azraq and Kharaneh. The first three days of this week went by very quickly, and without too much excitement. In Area A, we got down to the compact surface in most areas, but along the western edge of the Area we discovered several dark brown, organic-rich and grey, ashy stained areas, which had to be mapped in and sampled. Since these features also extended into the adjacent unexcavated squares, we also had to open up some new 1x1 m areas to get the full extent of these features. So, most of the week was involved in opening these new areas and getting everything down to the level of the lowest squares.

In Area B, Steve has been trying to sort out two particular squares which are really very confusing and have quite a few modern and ancient pit features that are driving him absolutely crazy (although fast-forward to the end of week 3, and he has it all sorted out now). The rest of the crew here have been trying to get through the first of the undisturbed levels. Already by the end of the week there are some interesting heavily mottled areas. The deposits here continue to be incredibly dense in lithics and fauna well below the surface.

Kevin came to visit and work on the site for a few days this week. I was really happy that he came out to see the site and work on it, but he kept writing in his field notes ‘No pottery found today’. This was not really the most helpful comment, since the site is occupied long before pottery was around! On Monday after work Toby, Danielle and myself headed into Amman for the Dept of Antiquities Prehistory Meeting from May 26-28. Toby and I presented on the 26th about Kharaneh and Ayn Qasiyah – actually that day was a bit of an Azraq Basin marathon – and Kevin presented on Ziqlab on the 27th. So, while we were in Amman on the 26th the crew was working on-site leaderless (and it went quite well, so perhaps Toby and I can sleep in a few other mornings…). On Tues, Toby and Danielle went back to site from Amman to give them a hand and bring Steve and Alison with all our vehicles into Amman, while I chaired a session at the conference. That night we went to 80’s retro night at a club in Amman – a night of dancing to 80’s music was just what we needed (that night – not the morning after)! The last day of the conference was a short day with a meeting about policy and practice for prehistoric projects in Jordan, followed by a really nice dinner courtesy of the Dept of Antiquities. The crew back in Azraq had a lab day of sorting through sieved material from the site for lithics and bone (all done with lost of music and singing and coffee and tea).

On the Friday and Saturday, Toby and I organised an informal ‘Azraq Workshop’, which was us getting together people who have and are now working on archaeological and palaeoenvironmental research in the Azraq Basin for a tour of archaeological sites and a round-table discussion of current and future, collaborative research plans. We felt that it was a very successful two days – the first day was a large crew of people on a fantastic tour of the Wadi Jilat sites with Andy Garrard and then a quick stop at Kharaneh to check out our progress before heading to Azraq.

We were a convoy of 5 four-wheel drive trucks ploughing through the desert with a purpose (= getting to Jilat; those of you who were present for our attempt last summer will remember that it is no small feat). About 6 people from this trip stayed at our dig house for the night to enjoy a BBQ and the metropolis of Azraq. The second morning, we toured the Azraq Druze Marsh sites of April and Carlos, then to the wetlands sites of Ayn Qasiyah and Ayn Soda. In the afternoon we had a round-table at the really swish Ecolodge to talk about public outreach, future collaborative research plans, and establishing a research community to keep in touch about our research and results. All in all it was a very enthusiastic bunch from two research projects, the Dept of Antiquities, and the RSCN (myself, Toby, Danielle, Phil, Leslie, Berndt, Carlos, April, Michael, Chris, Ahmad, Ahmad, Omar, Melanie, and Jessica) and we put together some really great ideas for increasing public interest and awareness of the prehistory of the Azraq area, and ways to present the sites to the local, national, and international public within the themes of preservation and conservation – two key themes for the Azraq area. That night some from the meeting stayed at our place and we did some flint knapping under the expert direction of Leslie. All in all, a great workshop!

Kharaneh IV 2009 - Week One

Hello everyone. Welcome to the 2009 fieldseason blog for Kharaneh IV. I’m sorry that the first instalment is so late into the season – it has been a whirlwind few weeks. Danielle and I arrived early on May 9 to get everything set up with the Department of Antiquties, our Rep, and to find a house in Azraq. With the help of our wonderful cook (and do-everything-else-around-the-house-guys) Ismael, we made the adventurous trip to Azraq by bus…We thought this would be a horrible long and arduous trip – who really wants to take public transport, without A/C, into the desert – but it turned out to be fairly speedy and efficient. This year we are a much larger crew, about double that of last year at 23 people, so we had to be quite selective about houses, or rather, we had to find a really, really big house! We ended up with two houses just down the road from each other and they have turned out to be quite perfect for us. The big chunk of the crew arrived on May 15, which was Toby with a bunch of students and equipment in tow from UCL, and a few arrived that day on their own. So we were myself, Danielle, Toby, Jen E, Pat, Caroline, Susannah, Matt G, Chris, Sam, Rowena, Steve, Hussein, Alison, and Bryan. So, by May 16, when we loaded up a giant truck, cleaning the CBRL out of equipment, we were a convoy of a huge truck piled high with our stuff, and three hired 4x4 trucks heading off to an oasis in the desert! We did stop for two of the most important things to have in Azraq along the way – fuel and beer…

We spent all of the day setting up the dig houses, with a lower house for eating, hanging out, a few bedrooms, and for the lab and the upper house (to borrow the Madaba terminology) all for crew bedrooms. May 16 was our first day on site – yippee. Wonderfully, things were almost exactly as we had left them. After a site tour and little wander around the area with the new people, we sent them on ahead to do some touristy things by visiting the castle (actually caravanserai) at Kharaneh and then the bathhouse of Amra. Myself, Toby, Danielle, Bryan, and Pat decided to lay out some new excavation squares. We found our on-site and off-site benchmarks with no problems at all – they had not moved a mm since we put them in – thank god! Andrew – you will be happy to hear that it took us all of about 10 minutes to have our grid from last year and we began laying out our new squares.

Given our goals for this season, which involve excavating an approx. 15,000-yr-old compact earthen surface (MEP) in one area, exposing the horizontal extent of a 20,000-yr-old organic-rich feature that may be the remains of a structure (EEP), and opening two completely new excavation areas (I’ll get back to that in a few weeks time), we have concentrated our efforts in two areas for the moment. We have placed new 1x1 m excavation squares in these two main areas, opening up large (for a Palaeolithic excavation) areas to trace the horizontal extent of these features. After a very successful first day on site, we relaxed at the dig house with some nice cold Amstel. The house is really in a nice location, and has a really big porch and front yard conducive to hanging out in the evenings. And, of course, it is perfectly located to enjoy all the sights and sounds of Azraq (trucks, mosque and roosters)!

The rest of week one went very smoothly and was really very productive. Day 2 on-site we had all hands on deck in removing the backfill from our old trenches (at the end of each season we fill in our excavation holes with sand to leave the site as we found it so the deposits we want to excavate next year are protected). This actually went very quickly (although it took all day, and I don’t think anyone would say it went quickly at the time). It was a very silty and everyone was absolutely covered in dust by the end of the day. Again, it was a good evening for Amstel. Everyone worked really hard, some people perhaps a little too hard, and we had our first casualty from the heat the next day…

The rest of the week involved getting through the surface disturbed deposits, which actually only took about 2 days in most areas, and then digging went more slowly as we worked to get down to our targets mentioned above. In Area A (the Middle EP area about 15,000 yrs old), Danielle’s crew have only about 40 cm to dig to expose this compact surface; however it is absolutely chalked full of lithics, charcoal, shell, and in particular, lots of large articulated bone (mostly gazelle and bovids). Plus, they kept finding cool features or artefacts in the baulk of one excavation square, meaning they would need to open up the adjacent one to fully excavate it. In Area B (the Early EP area about 20,000 yrs old), where Toby and I were working, things were more complicated as usual. The surface deposits here are carbonate concreted, meaning that a pick was actually necessary in parts. Underneath this, the deposits are quite mixed and disturbed in some areas, but not in others. Sorting this out the rest of this week and some of the next one. In fact, some of the deposits are clearly disturbed by modern activity, including one square where we discovered a de-activated mortar (and not the bedrock kind). But, all that is out of the way now…

And then, it was the first day off…Yeah! Most of the crew stayed in Azraq and hung around the dig house relaxing and checking email (that does actually take all day, given the connection there). Toby and a few brave souls made a trek even further into the desert to try and find the Natufian site of Shubayqa (and were successful). The rest us went, you guessed it, to Madaba.

We (myself, Danielle, Alison, Bryan, Rowena, Sam, and Susannah) did a little running around in Amman (met up with Kevin) and then drove to Madaba and headed to our favourite restaurant, Haret Djoudna, for a fantastic meal. The next day was all R&R by the poolside, the Ayola for lunch with Adel and Bilal, and some visiting. Of course, our trip back to Azraq was topped off by visit to Carrefour for supplies (coffee, cookies, and sorting trays).

The 2009 Field Season Cometh

It has been a long break, but soon things will be happening in Kharaneh - so please stay tuned. We will endeavour to provide you with frequent updates and pictures as bandwidth (and time) allows.

Week 6 – the end!

We have now completed our final week at Kharaneh IV for this year and I, for one, am now enjoying a relaxing week in Madaba. I am lounging pool-side as I write this...

Week six was pretty uneventful, but extremely busy. In the Middle EP area, we came down on a notably compact locus that still contained quite a lot of lithics and faunal, but all much smaller and less dense than the layer above. We are approximately 30 cm below the surface, which is roughly the level at which Muheisen reported a living surface and several postholes... We decided that time did not permit full excavation of this locus this year, so we exposed it, mapped it, and collected the surface material that we felt would not survive being backfilled until next year. Then, we buried it. Jay came out for the last few days, so we put him to work doing this (and backfilling, of course). We have a great deal of charcoal from this locus and the one above, so we are hopeful in getting good dates for these deposits. The microliths are all wacky trapeze/rectangles, some with interesting little points or hooks on one end. The bone is, not surprisingly, mostly gazelle. And, we continue to find lots of shell beads.

In the Early EP area, the new excavation squares produced a very large pit, similar in description to the one excavated from this area by Muheisen. Those in the deep trench continued to dig sterile for almost a metre (after we couldn’t move in the trench, we used the auger), and it was very dense, orange clay all the way! Sorry Matt, no clear greenish-grey lake silts below the site this year, but it is still about a metre above the modern wadi bed. However, our stratigraphic section from this trench is amazing – I’ve included a photo here – and we managed to pull out over 50 pieces of charcoal for dating.

Our last two days on site were occupied with drawing our sections and taking final photos, while we had a fence re-built around us. It is a temporary fence, until we bring a digger to site next year for our geomorph work and use it to dig proper foundations for permanent fence posts. But, hopefully it will do the trick until then. Then, the final day was backfilling – oh what fun! I hired a dump truck to bring us 12 m3 of sand to use for backfill (so it would be very different from any deposits on-site or nearby), and we filled lots of sand bags to keep everything anchored down. We also covered over just the very surface of our trenches with material from the sieve, so you would almost never know we were there...well, sort of (see pics).

Our end-of-dig party (the first one) was that night in Azraq, where we were joined by the crew of Carlos Cordova, Michael Bisson, and April Nowell. Our excellent cook Ismael made pizza and much celebrating was done as both projects had just wrapped up. The next two days were crazy hectic with packing up the material and the house. But, it all paid off when we got to Amman on the 6th and enjoyed a few hours at the hammam (having my ‘tan’ scrubbed away), and then an excellent dinner at the Vinagrette Cafe (our second end-of-dig party). For those who know my love of this place, I ate so much sushi I thought I would explode! The crew has all headed their separate ways now, and I am in Madaba catching up on a little R&R and hanging with my TO friends digging at Tell Madaba and Wadi Thamad. I think I will head now to the Ayola for a cheese sandwich and mixed fruit juice...

So, this will be my last up-date on this blog for a few weeks, until I return from the field in mid-Sept and start dealing with all the material we dug up. But, I will be sure to continue to post the progress of this material throughout the year, so please check in every so often.

Thanks to all of the crew for a productive and fun first season!