Here’s a time-lapse photography experiment by our registrar and photographer Sebastian Anstis showing excavation at the city wall…better at small screen size because of our uploading limitations. Watch out for the face towards the end!
Read More
We have a great team working at El Kurru and I’ve invited them to post to the blog. Here’s the first post, from Martin Uildriks, who worked at the City Wall last season and has returned this year. Continued excavations at the Great Wall at El Kurru City gateway (2014 photo) In his field notes…
Read More
By contrast to the situation in the temple and pyramid, our very simple covering of the city wall was in great shape. We had taken old shawwal (burlap sacks for dates), opened them up, draped them over the stones of the wall, and covered them with about 15 cm of sediment. Everything remained in place,…
Read More
The condition of the burial chamber of Pyramid 1 was better than the temple, fortunately. We had blocked the door into the pyramid burial chambers with a door that was in two parts—a lower part that roughly matched the original doorway, and an upper part that attempted to fill in the looters’ cut above it,…
Read More
We arrived in El Kurru having heard that there was some new graffiti in the funerary temple we had excavated last year, and I was concerned about my first visit to see the damage. Our small brick wall to reduce water erosion had worked well despite heavy rain, and the small barbed wire fence was…
Read More
Internet access in El Kurru village has been extremely slow this year. I’ve come down to Khartoum to resolve some banking problems—the grant from Qatar has finally arrived! It’s just in time for payday—I was starting to have mental images of an angry mob chasing me for money that I didn’t have (although my friends…
Read More
It can be really difficult to get an excavation project into the field. You have to find funding, gather a group of good people, buy supplies, anticipate issues that might arise…and if it all comes together at the right time, the project can go forward. We are ALMOST there. Because of some complexities of grant…
Read More
The National Geographic film that will include footage of our season will be broadcast on PBS stations here in the United States beginning on October 1. Check local listings for “Black Pharaohs”. DVDs will be available through National Geographic after that, and I assume the program will also be available for streaming, but that remains…
Read More
This was a challenging and interesting season at El Kurru. We worked long hours, and our work was often physically demanding. We made progress toward our goals of understanding the ancient settlement, but our current results are not yet fully satisfying. We worked on monumental structures that we will hope to finish excavating in the…
Read More
Because we spent much of our effort clearing monumental remains whose fills were largely empty, we did not find as many objects as we normally would during the course of an archaeological season. There were, however, several contexts that were rich in nearly whole ceramic vessels. One of these was a later occupation level…
Read More