Jurash July 23-August 18 Part 2

The team spent 18 days excavating at the site of Jurash from Saturday July 25 through Thursday August 13. The first morning I resumed excavation of my A.1 square from last season, but rain that afternoon left the square too muddy to excavate. Continued rain over the following few days damaged the sides of the square and prevented me from working in the A.1 square until it had dried out by the start of the third week. I was expecting to need only a couple of days to bottom out in the A.1 square, but as it turned out I needed to spend the entire third week excavating down to a depth of four meters through ashy, bone-filled deposits. The deeper I went the more steps I had to leave in order to get in and out of the square, so by the end I was excavating only about a half square meter area of the original three by three meter trench. There was virtually no pottery in the lower levels, so I do not really know the date of what I was excavating, other than a C14 date around the fifth or sixth century A.D. for some ash and charcoal from last season’s bread oven in the middle depth of the square.

The bottom levels of the A.1 square

But for the bulk of the season I worked in a new square BT.02, adjacent to a square that Bill Glanzmann was excavating on the top of one of the low mounds in the center of the site. Bill’s square proved to be a deep sequence of sterile sandy flood deposits with some deposits containing occupational debris, but no architecture. When my square was proving to parallel Bill’s results in the first few days, I got discouraged, but I eventually hit a substantial room in one part of my square.

Early days in the BT.2 Square

The exterior of the BT.2 Room

By digging down nearly four meters, I discovered that the building had two construction phases with an earlier wall line below. Excavation of the room interior came across a solid layer of fired bricks, including a large intact portion of an arch. Below the bricks were several intact roof beams, and we took a number of C14 samples to provide a date. But curiously below the bricks and intact roof beams was only sterile flood-deposited sand down to below the bottom of the walls, with no occupational deposits at all. The stark evidence for extensive flooding across the site was one major discovery about the site this season.

The interior of the BT.2 room, showing one of the intact roof beams and the arch

Elsewhere at the site, excavation continued from last season in a large monumental structure that proved to have mostly robbed out to within a few wall courses of bedrock. Also to our surprise it turned out that part of that structure had been excavated some years ago by an excavation project that none of us, including the Saudis, knew anything about.

All in all, the results of the second season were not very impressive and we are thinking that the site does not really warrant further excavation, so the future seasons of the planned five year project may be spent at some other site in the country.