This season’s fieldwork at Kiik Kamar Cave has come to an end.
Over the past weeks, we worked our way through the cave deposits, documenting each archaeological layer and collecting finds and samples along the way. Before leaving the site, we completed the final documentation and collected sediment samples for further laboratory analyses.
The excavation trench has now been carefully backfilled. Covering a trench after weeks of digging may seem surprising, but it is a standard and essential part of archaeological fieldwork. Backfilling protects the exposed deposits from weather, erosion and accidental damage, preserving the site until we return for another field season.
Leaving Kiik Kamar does not mean that the work on the site is finished. In many ways, it is only the beginning of the next stage. The artefacts and samples collected during the excavation will now move to the laboratory, where different analyses will help us understand the chronology of the deposits, reconstruct past environments and investigate the traces of human activity preserved in the cave.
This season brought us an important step forward: we reached the first Pleistocene deposits and discovered a cultural layer containing stone artefacts, animal bones and charcoal. These finds give us a first glimpse into human activity at Kiik Kamar during the Ice Age and provide new material for the questions at the heart of the INASIA project.
And fieldwork is not over yet. The team is moving on to another cave site, Darvazalik.