New explorations on the south side at Amara West
In my second season at Amara West – I spend the rest of the year as a field archaeologist in the UK – I have been excavating in the south-west portion of the town, an area never previously investigated, alongside Shadia Abdo Rabo, a curator at the Sudanese National Museum, also acting as our inspector from the National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums.
The first stage of our work was to locate the south-west corner of the town’s enclosure wall. You might think a wall 3.5 metres wide and several metres high would be easy to find, especially with the help of magnetometry data.
But, after two days of hard digging, there was no sign of the wall corner; local workman Abdul Razig was becoming increasingly frustrated and threatened to move trenches!
On the fifth day, relief, as several areas of mudbrick were exposed and identified as belonging to the town walls. The walls have suffered badly from deep pits dug through them to extract clay for building material.
Inside the walls, two distinct rooms were discovered, each one of considerable size, filled with over a metre of disturbed sands and silts, making excavation rather heavy-going. Battles with inflowing sand from the surrounding desert have been a daily occurrence, and one which has made us all experts in sandbag logistics.
The biggest discovery to date has been a mudbrick pavement in pristine condition laid across the surfaces of both rooms. This was a sign we were digging something pretty grand. The presence of two elaborate entrances flanked by large sandstone door jambs leading north from the paved areas emphasise that we are not in a modest domestic building.
The purpose of the rooms is currently unclear, though the pottery suggests it dates to the late New Kingdom.
Perhaps one space was an open courtyard, a communal area tucked away in the south-west corner of the town? Or was it a rather grand residence? Only with more digging will we find out more: from 7am tomorrow, armed with shovels, picks and trowels, we will be out there again, trying to seek evidence for these and other questions
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