One of the surprises of our work here at El Kurru has been the discovery of an apparently extensive Christian settlement of about 900 AD. The city wall we have been tracing seems to be of this date rather than the Napatan date of perhaps 700 BC that we had expected. We have now traced…
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Another installment of answers to Ms. Donnelly’s 6thgrade class that have to do with life on the dig…. We live in a house in the village—here’s a photo of the outer courtyard, which is really a nice place to have a cup of tea in the afternoon, and we do a lot of work here…
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I’ve encouraged the team to write guest-blog posts too. Here’s a note from our geologist/geophysicist, Dr. Carola Stearns, along with a photo of the area she’s working in—the mortuary temple: The landscape around El Kurru is one of remarkable contrasts: dry vs. wet. We are here in the dry season. The temperatures are slowly rising…
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National Geographic has asked me to blog on their site too. Here’s my first post, which is an introduction to our project: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2014/03/03/discovering-the-story-behind-a-temple-devoted-to-the-cult-of-a-dead-king/
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It’s been a very busy week on the dig, and I haven’t had so much time to write. But I can give an update on the pyramid now. We had completed excavating the stairs a bit over a week ago, and opened up the door block that we had put in over the hole that…
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I received a nice note from Julie Donnelly, who teaches at Clague Middle School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her 6th grade students had a bunch of really good questions about the dig and about living in a village in Sudan. It turns out that 6th graders are pretty smart! I’m going to try to answer…
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We are fortunate to be working at El Kurru with a group of 5 professors of archaeology from the University of Dongola at Karima. Led by Prof. Abbas Sidahmed Mohamed-Ali, with funding from the Qatar-Sudan Archaeological Project, they are working to restore and protect portions of the royal cemetery excavated by George Reisner nearly 100…
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On Thursday, we reached an amazing moment in our exploration of Kurru Pyramid 1: we uncovered the doorway to the burial chamber. In the pyramids of the kings and queens of Kush, the ancient builders cut a staircase into the rock that led down to two or more burial chambers. The staircase was open to…
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One of our three areas for excavation this year has been a city wall discovered by Reisner (but like all his settlement finds, never published). His notes say that it was 200 meters long with a gate in the middle of it. We thought we had found it last year, and we’ve been delighted this…
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This photograph was taken by Kathryn Howley, a graduate student at Brown who is a member of our team. She’s using a variety of advanced photographic techniques to document our work, including using software called PhotoScan to stitch together lots of kite photographs to produce 3-D models of the landscape around El Kurru. I’ll…
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