My friend and colleague from the Kelsey Museum at the University of Michigan, Suzanne Davis, has arrived to conserve and restore our finds, to consult on issues of architectural preservation (our local sandstone is mostly of really poor quality, very soft), and to help us think through our longer-term site management plan.

I haven’t talked much about objects we’ve found this year. It’s been an unusual season since so much of our effort has gone into excavating monumental structures that have mostly been cleaned out. The city wall soundings produced some whole ceramic vessels that had been left in medieval houses—you can see a couple of them being repaired on Suzanne’s table. They have bandages wrapped around them as if they had head wounds… We also have some Meroitic painted pottery from an upper level in the temple that should look nice when it’s put back together. And of course Suzanne does all this much better than we archaeologists would do on our own, so it’s great to have an expert here.