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!

Begining of Week 6 - already!

Just a very quick message while I am breezing through the internet cafe on my way to get more red plastic crates...We have just started our last week of excavations and are beginning to tidy things up. Two big things make the news for us: 1) last Friday it was 48 degrees celcius in Azraq!, and 2) yesterday we hit sterile deposits in our deep trench! Yippy. Matt - the deposits are clay, clay and more clay. We have just borrowed the CBRL auger and will see what else we can find you. Otherwise, the Early EP area has produced a very nice pit and a continuation of the series of stratified layers I mentioned earlier. We have only 2 more digging days, then sections, then backfilling! Wow, it has gone fast and we now have a lot of flints to deal with...

Weeks 3, 4 and 5...still digging...

We have finally found an internet cafe in south Azraq that is sometimes relatively quick, so I have attempted here to type out an up-date ahead of time and upload it at the internet cafe...Hope this all comes through to you! (I did already get booted off twice...) We are still digging away out in the desert and things are going very well. We spent most of weeks 3 and 4 moving dirt to get down to good deposits – this is much more time-consuming than it sounds given the incredible density of material from the site.

Just to give you some idea, we are screening through a double mesh system of 4 mm and 2 mm, and it takes over 1 hour to pick out all the flint and bone and shell just from the 4 mm mesh (never mind the 2 mm), so we are having to bag up all the material in both screens and sort it later in the lab out of the hot sun! And, in a 1x1m square area, digging only 5 cm in depth we are bringing back to the lab ~10 bags of 4 mm material and 4-5 bags of 2 mm material! And, some of the deposits are so carbonate concreted that we are having to use the big pick to dig them...Never thought I would need a big pick at this site, but the deposits in one of the trenches are as hard as rock. But, all that is gone and we have been digging good deposits in both trenches. Last week I posted some pictures of the crew members excavating, as well as a group photo of the 2008 Kharaneh crew.

Back row left to right: Jennifer Jones (UCL), Hussein Medinah (Beir Zeit), Danielle Macdonald (Toronto), Sam Allcock (UCL), Alison Damick (UCL), Tove Smith (Penn), Ibrahim Meslam (U Jordan), Andrew Graham (Toronto); Middle row left to right: Tha’ir (Azraq), Mohammad (Azraq), Basam (Azraq), Lisa Maher (Cambridge); Front row left to right: Tobias Richter (UCL), Amr (Azraq), and Ismael Karaeem (Amman). Missing are Louise Martin (UCL), Sue Colledge (UCL), Kelly Reed (UCL), Matt Jones (Nottingham). A great crew – we have had a lot of fun!

Perhaps to back up a bit, I should mention that we have opened up two main excavation areas: one in the primarily Early EP deposits at the highest part of the site and another to the southwest in the primarily Middle EP deposits. Muheisen excavated sondages in both these areas and we have selected them in order to re-open his excavation areas and more fully document the stratigraphy of the site and expose a larger horizontal area where he documented features such as living floors and postholes. And, indeed, it seems these are the deposits we are now coming down onto; but more on that in a moment. In the Early EP area, we have re-exposed Muheisen’s sondage, or at least as much of it as is still possible to identify (luckily, some of it was marked by glass bottles, styrofoam, and plastic). Here we have also excavated our own probe to expose a full stratigraphic section of these deposits, and are now just a few centimetres above where Muheisen reported hitting sterile deposits. In this area, we were able to further refine his stratigraphy as we discovered deposits about 1 m below the surface which consist of finely laminated ash- and charcoal-rich clayey deposits, that likely represent several stratified occupational horizons. These deposits are so rich in charcoal that we were able to collect charcoal from each individual horizon, and should we be able to get dates from these, we will have a very nice sequence in this trench. We have also identified a very compact yellowish clay horizon, also containing a great deal of charcoal that Muheisen documented as a floor. However, we will have to await more complete horizontal exposure of this next year to confirm it. In the Middle EP area, we have also re-opened Muheisen’s trench here (he excavated a 3x4 m area down 40 cm in depth) and expanded horizontally from this. Almost immediately (~10-15 cm below surface) we hit clean EP deposits containing large pieces of articulated bone, including cow-sized vertebrae and ribs and complete gazelle feet. And, of course more flint than we know what to do with – seriously! We excavated two layers of silt like this, and have now come down in the south portion of the area (adjacent to Muheisen’s trench) onto a more compact ‘surface’ (our working hypothesis) containing, again, lots of charcoal, articulated bone (but smaller), three mandibles (gazelle-sized), a notable shift from all types of flints to microliths (particularly the wacky trapeze/rectangles), brown stains, and bits of red ochre.

So, lots of excitement in the EP! We are now finishing off our 5th week of excavations and beginning to plan what we can reasonably get done next week, as well as planning our strategy for next year. We are now sitting in the lab looking at all the artefact we have collected and I think that next year we will have to bring a double team – one team that digs, while the other does nothing but lab work! On a related note, yesterday Alison and I went to Arab Box (the store in Sahab that sells red crates we use for holding finds) and bought 80 crates for finds. On the way back in the pick-up truck the rope burst and red crates spilled all over the highway. We were quite the sight running all over picking them up, and it generated quite a lot of honks from the truckers! It was quite entertaining (in retrospect, of course). Ok, now it is lab time and I have to go deal with more flints...stay tuned for an up-date of our last week of excavations next week.

Weeks 3 & 4

I am finally back in the land of internet access, well, at least for the next few minutes. I thought I would take this chance to upload a few pictures, but the text to go along with them will have to follow in the next few days...
Things are going very well and we are looking forward to the next two weeks (the last two, if you can believe it) digging in good deposits (well, mostly everywhere). We have dug one deep trench, and are starting another this week and will end this season with both some nice horiztonal exposures, as well as a good sense of the stratigraphy of the site in the two areas where Muheisen worked in the 1980's. Finds are pretty consistent - more flint than we know what to do with (all those who told us so now have bragging rights!), and we are continuing to get lots of faunal material (Louise, we are keeping Jen very busy), and shell beads like crazy. Here are some excavation shots of the crew working very hard in the hot sun, and sometimes in the crazy wind! (Ok, the picture of Danielle with beer is not actually on-site...)
Please be patient and stay tuned for further details...