ASP '23 Week 3: Sometimes, things go wrong
Dig life can be magical. Somehow, even between the dust in your lungs causing a chronic cough, freezing cold desert mornings, and exhaustingly long days, it still has a certain shimmer.
Dig life can also be horrible. Sometimes it's a swarm of flies that bite your hands all day leaving you with itching, bleeding welts that last for months [fun fact! Egyptians used fly amulets as military honors. It was a testament to the relentless drive of the soldier - and the Egyptian fly. I'm not kidding, nothing natural, or chemical can keep these flies away.], sometimes it's the disappointment of a collapsing shaft that took almost an entire week to excavate; other times, it's much worse.
This was one of those worse weeks for most of our team. Our Conservator lost her brother unexpectedly, our Director, her uncle, and Robyn - she's headed home early as I type this to her sweet, terminally ill dog, Luna, who took a turn for the worse. Is this the dig's fault? No. But does the uncertainty of life seep in when you're thousands of miles and (at minimum) a two-day journey from home? Oh, it does. So if you've got some good vibes to send our way, please do.
We adapt, though - Robyn and our Conservator were able to return home, our Director's family decided to push the funeral a few months, and the rest of us are learning how to be the best support system we can be for people that we just met two weeks ago. Not the happy, pithy opening I usually send, but I never said it would always be that way.
Archaeology does, however, continue, and it's a great reminder of how universal the human experience is. For example: I started the week off excavating my first intact burial...of a dog. This sweet pup was laid to rest some 3700 years ago in a shallow pit wrapped in linen or some other material by his owner or another unknown caring individual. They weren't provided with any grave goods, but they were curled up in a comfy position and had a prime spot in what seems to have been a very rich cemetery. Wherever this puppy is now, they're having a good afterlife.
I absolutely talked to he/she and told them they were a good dog.
We also began a second, much larger shaft to the south of our original one. The cut was a bit wonky, likely the result of some robbers digging a secondary hole to more easily access the burial chamber. The edge even had rope marks from either lifting or lowering something extremely heavy! This was the work completed after about 3 days.
Starting the shaft
That long vertical line is, indeed, from a rope!
Such progress!
Photo taking in the shaft.
The last photo might have some familiar features, like the hole at the bottom of the wall. "The burial chamber!" you may shout. Usually, you would be right and I'm proud of you for learning from last week! That, unfortunately, is not a burial chamber though, it is a massive undercut caused by collapsing/weak gebel that is mostly sand. Those photos? They're the closing shots for this shaft. After finding a mud-brick wall filling in the collapse on the north side we were optimistic that we could follow the ancient safety measure and add bricks all the way around to support the walls. We quickly learned that this was a robber wall, and it was constructed on loose sand (not safe!!). So, for the sake of our team, we decided to backfill what we had done and save it for another season when we can bring an engineer in to actually create some iron support beams. Was this the right decision? Yes. Am I disappointed? Also yes. It's still data though. Someone rich built a MASSIVE shaft in this location, and since it was robbed, we have some of that person's bones, and some of their painted coffin. It's not the burial chamber at the end of the rainbow, but it's still pretty good.
I can't wait to see what our conservator can do with all the pieces we found!
This early closure left time for some of the other things though, like opening two more ops to chase the walls of additional shafts, finding surface architecture [!!! this is super significant as we have no real surface architecture dating to this period elsewhere at Abydos], and excavating three more pits [only one child this time].
An overview of some of my Ops from the NE corner.
One of the pits from this week. It was exceedingly thin!
We also came down on FIVE layers of pottery that were left as funerary offerings over one of the tombs here. While none were completely intact, these vessels usually held beer, or some other food or drink, so I collected the sand inside of them to test for botanical remains. Lucky us, in the last hour of the last day, we came down on a second location with the same pottery about 10 meters to the East. This is super significant because it speaks to an active funerary practice across the cemetery, as opposed to just burial and abandonment.
The was just the first layer!
The rest of the site is a mix of confusion and excitement. Robyn's Op [now Ahmed's Op, we call him Tiger, so I may refer to him as such in the future] has produced a series of disconnected bricks and the corner of a large wall. Yazid's square continues to produce overlapping walls in a pattern that we can find absolutely no comparison for, and Hazem's square is 90% empty. No, literally. One corner has part of a kiln, and the rest is a meter of clean sand. So, we are all doing some reading on geological patterns in the area to see if we can figure out why Hazem (and Ahmed Hassan, about 200 meters away) both have this weird sand level.
Some of Yazid's walls
Ahmed Hassan's work near the pyramid is actually coming along nicely, save for the sand pit. He seems to have located the eastern boundary of the cemetery I'm working on and an enclosure wall. These burials are almost all just wooden coffins in the sand, but he's been able to find a number of remarkable small objects with, or near to, the bodies. This is particularly great for my dissertation because it raises a number of questions regarding who could possibly have been buried next to a pyramid, and how they got that access. This is also a great reminder of how important landscape can be to burial size and form. It's likely this was much more significant ground than the ground I'm working in, so even the über-rich would take a coffin in the sand next to a pyramid, even when they could have afforded a multi-chambered shaft across the cemetery. Always remember the time-honored mantra: "location, location, location!"
A tiny tiny Tawaret bead from one of Ahmed Hassan's burials.
A "charming" horse? frog? something? head from a figurine. Matt thinks I should get this tattooed on me. The jury is out on that.
You may notice you're receiving this week's newsletter a bit early. We had a shorter week this week as Debbie and I had to go to Luxor to get our visas extended. While that doesn't sound like fun (imagine a DMV, but for some reason, the music is way too loud), it does mean that at exactly halfway through my season, I get to spend two nights in a 5-star hotel on the Nile drinking more Egyptian coffee than my body can probably handle. I'll take it!
The view from my balcony.
Sending you all love and hoping for a much jollier newsletter next week! Emily