Bread and Beer

Having started our excavations as planned in the new area SAV1E, located 50 meters north of the sandstone temple A within the Pharaonic town of Sai Island, we encounter already some intriguing aspects. Just after 10 cms from the surface, first mud bricks appeared, still loosely scattered but obviously a hint to our expected Pharaonic building below. The ceramic material of the New Kingdom dates mainly to the early 18th Dynasty and the Thutmoside era – another feature which supports our prospects. The corpus of pottery is largely comparable with SAV1N, the excavation area further to the North at the enclosure wall. The so far most interesting aspect is a large quantity of New Kingdom beer jars and bread moulds. The latter have been almost missing in 5 years of work at SAV1N, but only the first two days at SAV1E yielded more than 50 pieces! Our preliminary interpretation refers to the neighbourhood of SAV1E to temple A – bread moulds and beer jars are typically associated with Pharaonic temple cult. A functional assessment of SAV1E is of course not possible at this very early state of work, but a connection with temple A is indeed likely. We are very much looking forward to our next discoveries!

First field season approaching

In a few days, the first group of team members will travel to Sudan and we will start our initial field season on Sai Island for AcrossBorders. We will work 6 weeks in the field, excavating a new area at the eastern edge of the Pharaonic town. We hope to be able to establish the dating and function of the structures we are going to unearth and add thus important information about the history of Sai Island. Another 3 weeks on Sai will be dedicated to the documentation of finds, ceramics and architectural elementsIMG_1240