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Girag Kasaman I

Evidence: Eneolithic | Bronze Age | Iron Age | Antique | Albanian | Medieval | Post-Medieval

This site had been identified early in the process, with excavation beginning in 2004 on the BTC trench line and followed by work in 2005 on SCP. The site lay on a slope above an abandoned meander of the Kura River. The northern part of the site was higher and formed a bluff into the floodplain, with higher ground to the west. Much of the northern part of the site had been damaged by an irrigation channel, a track and a series of relatively late burials. These made it difficult to understand fully the stratigraphy of that part of the site.

The major excavated elements were portions of structures and activity areas, defined by concentrations of storage pits, tendirs and hearths.

Structure 1 lay in BTC Excavation 1 and contained a large number of complete pottery vessels, lying in the remains of a timber structure that appeared to have burnt down. Several storage pits and a tendir oven formed the remainder of the area.

Activity area 2 lay in the middle of SCP Excavation 3 and was composed of several tendir ovens and associated storage pits, along with a number of post-holes indicating a structure over the area.

A workshop area was identified to the north of SCP Excavation 4, consisting of several kilns sat in a roughly rectangular hollow with other associated pits.

The south of SCP Excavation 3 also contained a concentration of pits and similar features that could indicate a further activity area.

BTC Excavation 2 produced relatively little information, apart from a group of storage pottery vessels in one area. The excavator reports that the soil horizons in this area indicate a soil movement had occurred, which is feasible given the high ground to the west.

Pottery from the site is nearly all unglazed and dates from the 8th to the 10th centuries. The excavator believes the dating evidence from the pottery is preferable to that from radiocarbon dates. There is a conflict between the two sets of information. The earliest date from the south of SCP Excavation 3 could be from an aberrant piece of early charcoal, as no evidence of Antique-period material was found on the site. The remaining dates are all either earlier or later by a century or so than the excavator's opinion. This is strange in that the pottery evidence indicates that there is a fairly closed group of material across the site and while the visual evidence implies the site was intensively used, there is no stratigraphic evidence to suggest many inter-cutting features.

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