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,…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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