We began this season hoping to establish a date for the largest pyramid at El Kurru and perhaps even to find the name of the king buried there. We knew that we would have a challenge navigating the possibility that the underground rooms would be structurally unsound and we had prepared to build support structures…
Read More
By the end of the season we had excavated two underground rooms of the building we’ve been calling a temple, following Reisner’s designation of it as a “mortuary temple”—a temple dedicated to the worship of a dead king. We succeeded in excavating the two outer rooms of the temple, shown here in a nice kite…
Read More
I am finally returning to work after an end-of-season bout of pneumonia knocked me out. Not what you think of when working in the desert, but maybe the hard work, the heat, and the general fatigue caught up with me. So now I’ll give four final posts that will bring our season to a close….
Read More
While I’ve been sick, another blog post made it on to the National Geographic site: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/04/continuing-excavations-at-an-ancient-burial-site-last-touched-in-1919/
Read More
I got sick at the end of the field season–a cold that turned into pneumonia. Slowly getting better, and I promise posts (and responses) when I’m back on my feet.
Read More
Due to overwhelming demand, I am giving my answer to the question of how tall our pyramid would have been when first built. The angle of the facing stones is about 73 degrees, and if you just do a calculation on that basis (yes, it’s trigonometry), you get a height of about 43 meters. If…
Read More
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…
Read More
Here’s a real-life math problem: How tall was our pyramid when it was built? You can see that it has some original stones left toward the bottom, but the upper part is all rubble that would originally have been invisible behind a nice stone facing. We are working on this question ourselves. Here is what…
Read More
The Sudanese team working at El Kurru is directed by Prof. Abbas Sidahmed Mohamed-Ali, with Prof. Jamaal Karfis of the University of Dongola at Karima (pictured here) as field director. We have had a chance to become good friends during this field season. The Karima team is continuing to clean and restore the dramatic tombs…
Read More
We’ll be part of a National Geographic film being made about the empire of Kush, and the film crew is here! The producer/director, James Barrat, has been interesting to talk to because he asks creative questions that we haven’t always considered before…and the NGS team has been great to work with. Here, I am getting…
Read More