A busy last week saw excavations wound up in Amara West, a concerted effort to survey, draw, photograph and record all the features exposed … and then the logistics of closing the dig house, travelling south to Khartoum, and finally flying home.
The season in the cemetery has prompted us to revise some of our previous assumptions (especially the discovery that it was used for New Kingdom burials) – more on that in the next post.
In the Ramesside housing block in the northwest of the town, we did not expose any new areas, but rather delved deeper into, and beneath, houses previously excavated. A key result of the season – in the buildings excavated by Tom Lyons – has been a clear understanding of how one early house was levelled in the mid-19th dynasty, to make way for a larger house. Within a short period, this house was then divided into two.
A short distance to the south, Mat Dalton and his workmen discovered a new house (E13.7), later covered by the standing architecture of house E13.4. This was rather different in character from the houses to the north – less axial in its layout (earlier houses seem to be arranged around a central room, with access to other rooms in various directions, later ones are arranged more in a progression from front to back) and with nicely plastered walls (whitewashed to a metre high, and framed with a black stripe, which also ran around the doorways).
Study of the plaster fragments back at the dig house suggested they may derive from both a shrine set in the wall, and from the decor behind the mastaba (low bench) itself – Mat found yellow and black paint in situ on the last day on site.
In the southwest corner of the town, Charly Vallance and Shadia Abdu Rabo exposed the levelled remains of a series of rooms built against the enclosure wall – very different in character to the large paved courtyards of the structure built over them (D13.4). One room contained an in situ grinding stone and ashy deposits with many botanical remains.
Further work is needed to see if these early rooms are contemporary with the foundation of the town. Despite all of the later pottery – of the post-New Kingdom and early Napatan era – found in this trench, it seems any buildings of that period have completely disappeared.
What next? We are currently awaiting our crates of archaeological samples and skeletal material to be shipped from Sudan, through the generosity of the National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums. This will allow us to continue analyses of pottery fabrics, dietary habits, the use of plant materials and to analyse the health of individuals buried in the cemeteries, in the laboratories of the British Museum and also at Durham University.
In the meantime, there’s a mass of paperwork and documentation to deal with: plans to be scanned and inked, context sheets to be digitised, and parallels from other contemporary towns and cemeteries to be sought…. and a 2012 season to be planned!
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