Digging Week One

The Areni Cave site

So now I am at the truly exciting part of my Armenian adventure, the excavating! Our first day at the cave was just being acquainted with the site and the history. The site currently consists of three trenches (trench one, three and four). Trench two was taken over by trench three when it was expanded. Trench four is on the slope of the hill as you walk up the cliff to the cave and is a midden site based on the amounts of ‘trash’ and the mixed context layers. Trench three is the largest trench and my personal favourite. The upper layers were of mixed context and provided some great medieval artifacts from pottery, textile, a piece of a manuscript, a Armenian version of a hearth, among other things dating to the medieval period. However, the majority of the trench is dedicated to the time period called the aneolithic or chalcolithic which is the name used for the copper age. The copper age was a short period between the Neolithic (when people became less nomadic and began domestication of plants and animals) and the Early Bronze Age. The Chalcolithic is an amazingly interesting transitional phase in human history. Trench three is where the famous Areni Shoe was found (dating 5500 years) and is also home to many in situ ceramic vessels of all sizes. There has also been many grape seeds and plum pits found here which are being genetically tested and examined to determine if the species were wild, domesticated or in the in-between stage. This will help us understand the technological advances, and how sedentary these people were at the period. Trench one is inside the cave, which is lit with lights strung on rope on the cave walls. Trench one is was completely uncontaminated and everything there was considered to be in the exact place they were left when the people abandoned the sight (referred to as in situ). Trench three was recently victim to looting, the only painted vessel known in Armenia dating to this period (the only others similar are found in Iran) had its lid broken and the contents were stolen. Because we don’t know what was in there yet we are now missing a large piece of the puzzle. It is also possible that this pot contained human remains as many burials were in ceramic vessels. The initial test borings conducted in Trench Three uncovered three of such burials. These burials are considered primary burials in the archaeological context, but secondary burials from a biological anthropologists standpoint as they would have been dismembered immediately after death (based of the quality of organic preservation) and defleshed (based on cutmarks) and then placed in the pots and buried. The interesting part was that the skulls were caked in unbaked clay before put into the pots for burial. This has no practical use and so it can be assumed that this was ceremonial in purpose. One of the skulls has amazingly preserved brain matter and is considered “the world’s oldest brain.”

After getting a history of the last few years of excavation at Areni, the history of the Chalcolithic people of the Caucuses, and the geological history of karstic caves, such as Areni, we watched the surveyor’s grid the new trench two which is where we will be working. At my last field school we did all our own survey work and I really enjoyed using a theodolite and doing mapping and gridding... to me is just comes with the territory. The Areni site is fairly high profile now and so it has the budget to hire a survey crew. I was a little frusterated with the lack of translation during the surveying as I feel it’s an important skill for all archaeologists to learn and would have been a great refresher for me. I loved how the theodolite here had a laser... so no one had to stand with a stadia rod like the old school theodolite we used at MUN.

The rest of the week we spent opening our trench, and if any of my Chain Rockers are reading this ... if you think lifting the sod on Signal Hill was bad... try three feet of solid dung. It was like cement. We had to take pick-axes to it and have the workers take their shovels just to get to a softer layer. So week one is done, and we haven’t even gotten our trowels out yet.

We also began lab rotations and began washing pottery from last year’s excavation. It’s really interesting to see the ceramics from the site, most are considered stonewares and there are no glazes. Some of the pots are burnished black and some have ochre coloring. I noticed that the majority of the pottery shards show signs of reduced kiln atmosphere, which is when the firing temperatures are not hot enough and it cases the clay to layer as the insides were never completely baked.

Can’t wait to reach a cultural layer and get finding some of our own artifacts!