ASP '23 Week 6: The Finish Line 𓆚
Hello everyone, from the small paradise called Hurghada. After a few days of real relaxation, it's time to give you the lowdown on the final week of excavation.
(excessive brick pile explanation coming soon)
Our extra Saturday of work was, shockingly, calm. Unfortunately, we all got a touch ahead of ourselves. It turns out that the burial shaft was an unintentional trick of the robbers' doing. Our pile of bricks turned out to be just that, a pile of bricks, all on top of a single leg bone. A bit anti-climactic. What is interesting though, is the question of where on earth all these bricks came from in a pit tomb. It, along with some of the small burials in other Ops, opens up the possibility that some of these tombs were bricked over after burial.
The pit with the bricks in place
The mysterious pile of reeds in the bottom of our small pit tomb was our next task, and that one paid off a little bit more. It turns out there was a burial carved into the bottom of the chapel that sat above the tomb we excavated last week. What is interesting about this is that we had assumed that the chapel was for the large shaft we had to call it quits on - and it may have been - but this individual's presence complicates it all a little. The way the pits were cut and layered it appears that the chapel was built first, then a cut was carved into the bottom of it (evidenced by the 20cm elevation difference on either end), and then the small pit from the week before was placed on top of the feet of this earlier burial, with a shifted N-S orientation. As this whole cemetery was only active for 3-4 generations, it's difficult to understand how and when these burials were placed, if the chapel was meant for a very rich and powerful family (who built the massive shaft). This should be elucidated a bit more when we have the dating back from the pottery in each burial, but we are theorizing that either the shaft and chapel were just too good and so large that people buried their dead around it (a very common practice, you can hitch a ride with the richer people, and maybe take some of their offerings), or perhaps the shaft was meant as a family tomb but they found it just as unstable as we did and abandoned it. Thus, the 6 burials around it are the extended family who had not yet died when the shaft was dug. I'm still iffy on this theory because the pits range from exceedingly well-dug and shaped to, "uh oh, Ptahhotep died, let's dig down 10cm in a wonky shape and call it a day," but time will (might) tell.
An overview of the chapel, N-S pit, and foot-well of the E-W pit
The reeds, in detail
With the two things calling to me finished, we moved on to cleaning the areas that needed some fine-tuned brushing while also jumping into some "smaller" excavations for last-minute detail. One of these was an ash lens (or so I thought), which turned out to be a rather disturbed pit burial fill for which we couldn't find the actual cut in the gebel. After an hour, we called it quits, took record photos, and pinned it to come back to next time.
The chaos pit (with a lovely piece of red-burnished pottery!)
I was also tossed onto the Op of Ahmed Tiger, who had to leave on the 16th as he was being shifted to another project by the ministry. He had slogged through three Ops with only one pit tomb and the edge of a shaft, but we wanted to pull down 5x10 of one of the Ops another 10cm to see if there were any pits. There were - two more pits and another shaft. The top of one of them gave us a lovely little scarab with a recumbent (albeit, quite angry looking) gazelle. This led everyone to proclaim that I had some sort of power and it wasn't that I just had the good Ops.
I mean, it is, quite literally, a perfect scarab
I spent the next two days writing, taking measurements, and mapping with Mohammed - which was lovely as I got to experience the site with minimal people present.
Wandering, at sunrise
While I was doing this, half of the ASP team started on the second part of our season, which is the conservation of the pyramid of Tetisheri. I am sure I touched on this in the first newsletter in this series, but as a refresher - The pyramid is a cenotaph to the grandmother of Ahmose, who he credited as being an important figure in his life. The late 17th/entirety of the 18th Dynasty was about female power (don't let anyone tell you Hatshepsut was a blip in history, or "stole" the throne from her stepson/nephew, there was historical precedent). The goal is to stabilize the parts of the collapsed mud-brick pyramid that remain (with the assistance of the former college football star, turned mud-brick conservation demi-god, Tony Crosby), and to build up some of the walls to provide a space where tourists can visit and understand what once stood there. This is where all those bricks from the opening photo come into play (30,000 of them produced by hand in three weeks, to be exact).
An overview of the Northern corner
The first step was cleaning up (excavating) the structure to find the corners and the base of the walls. This was particularly difficult as the site had (supposedly) been excavated by two projects - once in 1904, and again in 2004/2010, but approximately 90% of the pyramid was unexcavated. Baffling. Did I mention that the 2004/2010 project still hasn't published any of their data and is mad at us for "stealing" the site? It's a long story, but I'm prepping for a standoff at this year's conference. So, in doing this, the team came across some human bones - so they did what any sane (?) person would do, and asked me to excavate as the "tomb" specialist on the team. We knew that there were some later-period (Late Antique/Early Islamic Period) burials in the area, but, again, nothing was published about them.
The "casemates" I was asked to assist with
Brushing off some ancient surfaces
So, I agreed (obviously, who wouldn't?!), and hopped right back into excavating. The area produced a hip bone and some fabric, the latter of which was in great shape. I started poking around the adjoining casemate structure though, and almost immediately found a set of human toe bones. So, clearly intent on making more work for myself in the last days of my tenure this season, I set to work in this area too. Remember how everyone thinks I'm super lucky or have some sort of archaeology superpower? I might believe them. The structure had a later period burial, with a strange stick-and-mud coffin and some basketry which was super cool, but it also had some massive (like, 60x60x10cm) bricks. We're talking the two largest bricks currently known by Egyptologists...and they were stamped, twice, with Ahmose's name. His stamp is on every brick in this area (sans the new ones which all say ASP - a fun way to make sure future archaeologists can identify what was from 1500BCE and what was from 2023CE), but none had a double stamp and not a single one was larger than 40x20x10. We all started throwing out theories - Tony thought they could be casing from the outside of the pyramid, but we were able to flip them and they were smooth on both sides - Ayman suggested they were covering the burial chamber of Tetisheri (because he loves the biggest theories) - I thought they could have been covering something, but I suggested they were offering tables - and Ashraf refused to theorize because he had never seen anything like it (gotta respect a man who knows when he's stumped).
The giant brick
One of our ASP bricks, with some puppy contributions
Ultimately, we have no idea. We're sending photos of them to specialists, and they'll eventually get published, and maybe there is something out there like them. The problem is, early archaeology paid no mind to mudbricks, even with royal stamps. Being so, there could have been thousands of these, all now hacked to bits because someone believed they covered something more valuable. I digress! What these bricks were though, was a great way to end my season. Aza is working on conserving them so that when I return in May we can look at them a little closer, along with all the material from the Ahmose Cemetery.
Transporting the bricks back to the lab
Oh, no, you didn't expect a tidy ending, did you? There was something under the bricks, and under the NE corner of the pyramid, and under the fall of debris in the SE corner, this is not to mention the thousands of dog mummies used to fill in the outer spaces (the Romans were weird...). Under all of this was a series of body stains. Yup, the juices from bodies that were rapidly sucked dry by the surrounding desert. Body stains that continued for over HALF A METER into the ground (shoutout to Lauren and her Bio Anth friends for their help regarding body fluid gravity). What seems happened, was that Ahmose chose a place in the desert that was already inhabited by a cemetery. This may have been purposeful (we love an appeal to antiquity in Egypt), may have been accidental. What his team did though, was scoop out all the burials and plop this pyramid on top. Thus, what we were left with was no bones, no goods, not even pit cuts - just juices. I'm personally of the opinion that these burials are what make up the shaft burial of 140 individuals found by UPenn last summer, so you heard it here first (if that ends up being the case).
An ostracon with a dog (or jackal) on it, found near the dog mummies
So yes, the site gives and it gives and it gives, in a way that makes it hard not to anthropomorphize and hard not to suggest that it wants its story told and so we do just that. So while I'm done there for 2023, I'm pretty confident it's only the beginning.
Matthew surveying his first Pyramid! He was only in Abydos for three days, but he's well-prepped to be an excavation husband
And with that, back to vacation! Sending you all 𓋹𓍑𓋴 (life, prosperity, and health), and some 𓏙 (bread) for good measure.
Stay tuned for May! Emily
The lifeblood of an Egyptian field season