Tag Archives: SAV1 East

Of merits and flaws preparing archaeological publications

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It has been silent from my side the last months. Too silent for my opinion; for too long, even during summer break. Almost no tweets and no updates or posts on this blog.

Well – I believe I have the perfect excuse: we’ve been extremely busy preparing the next AcrossBorders monograph in the last weeks and I am delighted to say that it’s actually done! Just printed all of it!

This volume is quite substantial – under the title “AcrossBorders 2: Living in New Kingdom Sai” it brings together our most important results of work about the New Kingdom remains at Sai Island in northern Sudan in the last years. Johannes Auenmüller, Annette M. Hansen, Frits B.J. Heinrich, Veronica Hinterhuber, Ptolemaios Paxinos, Nadja Pöllath, Helmut Sattmann, Sara Schnedl and Martina Ullmann have contributed apart from me to this new book. It focuses on the landscape and environmental remains of the Egyptian town on Sai and it introduces AcrossBorders work at sectors SAV1 East and SAV1 West. Archaeology and architecture are presented together with the objects and ceramics as well as specialized chapters on sandstone quarries, animal bones, molluscs and botanical remains. The occupants of New Kingdom Sai are discussed and some new ideas are put forward regarding the ‘social fabric’ and the intermingling of Nubians and Egyptians at the site.

The manuscript has a total of 700 text pages and comprises all together 300 tables, figures and plates – so indeed a substantial next volume in the AcrossBorders series of monographs which will again be published by OREA in Vienna. I will submit the manuscript on Monday and hope that the peer reviewing process will start soon!

As proud as I am today, as tired I feel. The last two weeks have been extremely intense, one could also say crazy. Working hours did not just increase but plainly doubled and several panic attacks about my own insufficient timing took turns with unexpected and very time-consuming problems with hard- and software. Most of us know all of this – finalising a manuscript means just loads of things, loads of organization and occupies one completely. No matter how much I love my occupation as archaeologist, these are the days and weeks when the really important things in life fall short – family and friends, pets and sports. In Munich, the inconvenient opening hours of grocery shops start getting on your nerves and your fridge stays empty. You’re so occupied with these texts and figures of the book you’re working on, you forget to eat and drink – and look at least 10 years older every evening and every morning in the mirror. A certain line for me was drawn when I completely forgot about and just heard it in the radio next morning that my favourite soccer team actually made it to the group phase of the European League after all (and this is the Austrian team which really deserved it, not the other one which simply keeps failing the qualification to the Champions League…).

Well – now it’s done and I cannot believe it. Without the tremendous support and help of Veronica Hinterhuber, this would not have been possible – she took so much work off my shoulders and was perfectly organised as always. Cajetan Geiger also deserves loads of thanks for preparing last minute new versions of figures and plans.

Of course as archaeologists it’s the major task to publish our results – and here, I do not necessary mean the general “publish or perish” policy which is putting so much pressure on especially young scientists from all fields. No, in archaeology, I completely agree with Peter Drewett and the following: “The only truly bad archaeologist is one who does not publish the results of his or her field investigations. All else is opinion” (Drewett 1999, 6). Our work does not stop in the field, but it is actually there where it starts.

Preparing results of archaeological excavations for publication is, however, not an easy task. One always has to balance between a descriptive way of presenting the results in a clear way, and an interpretative analysis of the same. And, since modern fieldwork is usually very interdisciplinary, one also has to bring together a large number of diverse lines of research and try to combine and/or compare results from various groups of data.

The AcrossBorders 2 volume will hopefully meet up to these standards and expectations – I am really looking forward to the reviews, always happy to incorporate some suggestions and to improve certain aspects. But in the end, I believe we did already quite a good job as an archaeological project, finishing the second monograph within one year after our final season at Sai. And I hope this will also be appreciated by the community and colleagues.

I have to stop now. Sportschau is about to start on TV. Back to normal life, at least for a while. Work on the third AcrossBorders monograph will commence soon, but the really crazy days are still a long way off.

Reference

Drewett, Peter L. 1999. Field Archaeology: An Introduction. London.

Preparing for publication

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The last weeks have been quite intense – time flies by and the end of the project is approaching while the teaching term here in Munich has again started. All of us are currently busy preparing tasks for the next publications of AcrossBorders.

Johannes and me have submitted the manuscript of our conference proceedings to Sidestone Press – it will appear, as planned, in September 2018! And will provide new information about cities and households in Ancient Egypt and Nubia, of course with a special focus on AcrossBorders and its case studies Sai Island and Elephantine.

Veronica is currently preparing several things for the next monograph, to be published again in CAENL of OREA. This volume will be entitled “AcrossBorders 2: Living in New Kingdom Sai” and will comprise descriptions of the environmental conditions for the New Kingdom town of Sai Island as well as overviews of the excavations in SAV1 East and SAV1 West and the associated material remains. The book will also include results of AcrossBorders comparative approach looking at Abydos and Elephantine when assessing Sai as New Kingdom microcosm in ancient Nubia.

Last 3D models, sections and plans are getting prepared by Cajetan, while Daniela is busy with digitalizing drawings of objects from Sai Island, here in particular from SAV1 East.

I am very proud of my team because we’re so well in time, processing is much advanced and the assembly of all data will provide fresh results in the very near future.

We like it hot – in Khartoum

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Since Saturday, a small AcrossBorders team is busy working in Khartoum in the National Museum of Sudan. This two-week study season is dedicated to the documentation of finds from our 2017 fieldwork season on Sai Island. Due to the amazing discoveries both in the town and the cemetery, we simply ran out of time back in March and had to postpone the study of some objects. I am especially grateful to our colleagues from NCAM for their constant support and for a very productive setup and generous working hours! And we are really delighted that Huda Magzoub, our dear colleague, inspector and friend, joined as for this ultimate AcrossBorders season in Sudan. Temperatures here in Khartoum are quite a change compared to Vienna and Munich ;-).

Besides work on objects from Tomb 26, we are currently busy with material from the two large cellars we excavated in SAV1 East (Features 83 and 85). Both cellars represent very good contexts from the mid-18th Dynasty and therefore their pottery and small finds have particular importance for our study of the material culture in New Kingdom Sai.

I was especially looking forward to start working on the sherds from Feature 83. Below the collapsed bricks from the vault of this cellar, some smashed pottery vessels were found on the floor.

Broken pots at the bottom of Feature 83 – note the smashed jar in the middle of the picture.

These ceramics clearly belong to the latest phase of use of the structure and can be dated to the mid-18th Dynasty – but back in Sai, they were all broken vessels, not allowing proper photographs or drawings. In the last days here in Khartoum, I managed to reconstruct them – my personal favourite is this nice imported jug with painted decoration. A real beauty came out of those smashed sherds!

Reconstructed imported jug from Feature 83.

AcrossBorders in retrospect

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Those were the days – back in 2013 we had our first season on Sai Island, starting work at sector SAV1 East. The outlines of Building A were discovered, exciting finds in the southern part of our squares allowed us to date the earliest remains in this area to the very early New Kingdom. Among the highlights were pots from the early 18th Dynasty, found in situ in a small storage bin.

Continuous excavations until this spring season 2017 brought to light further evidence supporting this original interpretation. It is well timed that a substantial volume on “Nubia in the New Kingdom” was just published – edited by Neal Spencer, Anna Stevens and Michaela Binder these proceedings of a conference in London 2013 bring together the latest results and a large variety of finds dating to the New Kingdom, unearthed in northern Sudan. I am proud that also AcrossBorders’ work on Sai Island is represented in this splendid and important volume – an overview about “Life in the New Kingdom town of Sai Island: some new perspectives” summarizes the potential of the first season back in 2013 in SAV1 East – and illustrates among others the significant find of the storage bin with its in situ pots.

Since 2013, I regularly wrote a blog post “summer break” in August, announcing vacation and a short break from our various tasks including blogging – well, those were the days… 2017 is a bit different – with the closing conference “From Microcosm to Macrocosm: Individual households and cities in Ancient Egypt and Nubia”, to be held from 1–3 September, 2017 in Munich, we are all very busy and time for vacation is limited. Travelling between Vienna and Munich, we are especially involved in the anthropological findings in Tomb 26 and the GIS applications of our documentation; the digital landscape models of Sai are getting prepared and all will be presented at the conference.

Perfectly timed is now the release of a video produced by the FWF high lightening our main research questions and most important discoveries on Sai. For those of you who have missed photos and reports about the nimiti flies in the last months – I am convinced that the video will make up for this: beautiful shots of SAV1 East, the one and only nimiti paradise ;-).

Piecing the town layout further together

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As posted recently, some new observations about the town layout of the New Kingdom Sai are possible thanks to AcrossBorders’ archaeological fieldwork on Sai Island from 2013 until 2017. In a short summary, now available for free online, I stressed that our archaeological excavations were complemented with kite aerial photography, structure from motion approaches, terrestrial 3D laser scans, geoarchaeological surveys, micormorphological soil sampling and various archaeometric analyses of diverse materials. Naturallly, much potential derives from this combination of methods and approaches.

The recent 2017 field season on Sai Island provided some answers to both general research questions, e.g. about the occupation of Sai during the 18th Dynasty, but also to more detailed questions like building phases within individual sectors. Excavations in sector SAV1 East resulted in particular in new insights on the layout and function of the New Kingdom town.

Large subterranean storage rooms were unearthed in rooms with schist floors, stressing the role of Sai as Egyptian administrative center during the mid-18th Dynasty. The new cellars (Feature 83 and 85) and corresponding rooms are comparable to the southern sector of the town, excavated by a French Mission in the 1970s and recently re-studied by Ingrid Adenstedt.

Feature 83 and 85 are probably related to the Egyptian stone temple, Temple A, close by. With our new fieldwork, the town map can therefore be updated and fresh remarks on the internal structure are possible.

Highlights of the 2017 season: the New Kingdom town

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Besides our very successful work in Tomb 26 with the undisturbed burials from the 18th Dynasty, our final season in the New Kingdom town, excavating both at SAV1 West and SAV1 East, was also very successful.

Another storage installation at SAV1 West… featuring a royal inscription on a re-used stone block!

Excavating the storage pit and cleaning surface area for another cellar – located in the northeastern corner of our excavation square…

Sieving the material from the bottom of the storage pit: undisturbed mid-18th Dynasty context!

New mud brick structures and loads of ceramics from SAV1 West.

Taking micromorphological samples in the “wall street” during “nimiti happy hour”…

Starting work at SAV1 East – aiming to clarify the dimensions of in situ-schist pavement.

Finding more schist – and: one large cellar!

And discovering another large cellar with its vault still in situ…

Fighting against nimiti and time pressure!

Finishing up what was the highlight of all 5 seasons in the Egyptian town on Sai!

Thanks again to all team members – has been a great season!

Short summary of AcrossBorders’ 2017 season on Sai Island

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A little hard to believe, but I am almost ready to leave Sudan and return to Munich! 11 weeks since we arrived here in Khartoum, 10 very exciting weeks of fieldwork, lots of new discoveries and much food for thought!
Thanks to the excellent working conditions provided by the local authorities to archaeologists in Sudan, we are able to export samples for scientific analysis – this will allow us to update and check some of our preliminary data from the field further in the next months.

The most important results of this 2017 season are as follows:
At SAV1 West, remaining deposits in Squares 1S and 1SE were investigated. The remains of several small mud brick buildings including one storage pit and one cellar were exposed and stratigraphic information was received from cleaning selected areas, including the “wall street” along the town enclosure. Most importantly, the earliest phase of occupation at SAV1 West seems to be contemporaneous to the one at SAV1 North – and predating the building of the town wall under Thutmose III. Only scarce remains of the early 18th Dynasty occupation at SAV1 West have survived, with the major phase in the mid-18th Dynasty partly superimposing earlier structures.
At SAV1 East, excavation was completed in Square 4C, finding more schist pavements. Other floors and mud bricks of already known structures. An extension was added towards the southwestern part of the site in order to trace a mud brick wall and in situ schist pavement further (new Square 4D, 6.5 x 9m). Within Square 4D, two large cellars were discovered (Feature 83 and Feature 85). Their size (3.3 x 1.8 x 2.00m and 3.7 x 1.5 x 2.05m) and East-West alignment corresponds nicely to the previously excavated structure, Feature 15. While Feature 83, the southern cellar, was disturbed by a pit in its western half down to the bottom, and only had in situ 18th Dynasty vessels left on the pavement in the eastern half, Feature 85 was found with its vault still partly intact.

Work in progress in feature 85.


Tomb 26, discovered in 2015, was completely excavated in 2017. Feature 4, the trench in the north, was cleaned and yielded a number of burials. Chamber 6, the northern burial chamber, held two coffins of which only traces survived in the flood sediments as well as rich burial equipment of Egyptian style: scarabs, faience vessels, pottery vessels and one stone shabti were used as burial goods. Traces of the funerary masks have also survived. According to the inscribed finds and the human remains, the double burial in Feature 6 can be identified as the master of gold workers Khnummose and an anonymous female person. Finally, Feature 5, the chamber located to the west of Chamber 2, yielded 9 adult and 2 infant burials, again with a nice selection of finds comprising scarabs, amulets and pottery vessels as well as few traces of the funerary masks and coffins.

All achievements of this season would not have been possible without great team work – many thanks go to all colleagues and students working in the field and the magazine who coped so well with time pressure and loads of finds, to all of our local workmen who faced together with us at SAV1 East nimiti-attacks which were just as bad as in our first year back in 2013! And of course to our wonderful NCAM representative and inspector Huda Magzoub, as well as to the great house staff, Sidahmed, Osama and Ridda. Last but not least, the dig dog Ramsis and his cute and entertaining off springs brought much comfort in dark black-fly hours!

End of fieldwork on Sai Island

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After very intense last days – with severe attacks by nimiti-flies from 6:45 am onwards – and a total of 10 successful weeks, we finished fieldwork on Friday and returned back to Khartoum yesterday. Most of the team has left already this morning; Cajetan and me stay two more days to arrange our export samples and other things.
To be very honest: I am still too tired to write up a proper summary of this simply amazing season! I am also too impressed by all of the finds from the last days – the big cellars we excavated in square 4D at SAV1 East were better preserved than originally thought. Their discovery itself did not come as a surprise – thanks to Martin Fera and his close look on the map of the geophysical survey back in 2011, we were expecting something similar like feature 15.

The two new cellars in Sq. 4D during excavation.


Feature 83, the southern cellar, was exposed first, because it was disturbed by a later pit in its central and western part. The pavement in the eastern part was still preserved and yielded some nice in situ finds of pottery and animal bones.

Cellar 85 with its vault still in place.


Feature 85, situated in the north, however, was much better preserved: at least it was not disturbed by pits from above. Part of its vault is still in place, only its side walls have collapsed and covered the lower part of the cellar. A really amazing find, very unexpected for SAV1 East in general – and very challenging for the very last week of a fieldwork project!
Both new cellars are similar in date and belong to the major Thutmoside building phase at SAV1 East – contemporaneous to Building A. They add important data to the general layout of the town and the functional interpretation of SAV1 East.

For now a big “thank you” to all the brave workmen and the staff working at SAV1 East – including the “magazine guys” who helped us finishing on the very last day, despite of the black flies attacks! When even the workman who never never never wears a mosquito net does ask for one and then does not take it off for one second, you really know that these last weeks were like hell – but with much reward regarding the archaeology of New Kingdom Sai!

Summary of week 8, fieldwork season 2017

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In week 8 of our current fieldwork season on Sai, we started excavations at sector SAV1 East with a group of workmen. We extended our excavation area towards the southwest, opening a new square labelled Square 4D, hoping to get more remains of the mud brick structures we found last year with in situ-schist pavements.

First day at SAV1 East, with part of the extension Sq. 4D visible.


Making very good progress, we have indeed exposed already a new mud brick wall which is exactly in line with the one in Square 4C! Some of the bricks of this wall are burnt, lots of ash and charcoal were found adjacent to it. Together with a very large proportion of 18th Dynasty bread moulds, I am wondering again – like I did in earlier season – if SAV1 East is connected with the production of bread for the nearby Temple A. The amounts of ceramics are still in general amazing: I processed 112 baskets of pottery from only 5 working days! Dating confirms earlier results: a very good presence of mid-18th Dynasty material, some late 18th Dynasty and few Ramesside sherds, all together with mixed material from later periods up to Ottoman times.

Work in the magazine with registration, drawing of pottery and small finds is progressing very well. This week, Daniela Penzer joined Oliver in making drawings of pottery, Lucia Sedlakova concentrates on objects from the town area.

Regarding new finds, the usual stone tools, clay beads, female figurines and reused sherds came in this week from SAV1 East. Our registrar Meg Gundlach is still mostly occupied with wonderful things from Tomb 26 – more scarabs, more amulets and more gold foil from funerary masks. The beautiful crocodile amulets – now a total of 4, probably all belonging to a female adult buried in the northern part of Chamber 5 – were photographed and described in detail.

In addition, with the re-arrival of Cajetan Geiger, the new chambers and excavated areas of Tomb 26 were completely surveyed and measured.

With the end of our season approaching, Andrea, Marlies and me will now spend a productive Friday in Tomb 26 – aiming to finish documenting it today! An update will follow shortly.

Summary of week 7, field season 2017

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In week 7, we started with post-excavation documentation of the burial of Khnum-mes from Chamber 6. There are two aspects that I got completely wrong during excavation while the objects were still in situ, dusty and not yet clean: the total of 6 “stone vessels” from Chamber 6 are actually made of a different material – they are all in faience! Very nice parallels can be found in neighbouring tombs excavated by our French colleagues.
The second modification concerns Khnum-mes’ title – already when taking out his shabti and the faience vessels, I was a bit irritated by my first reading as “wab-priest”. Well – in the magazine, with good light and together with our registrar Meg Gundlach, it is now clear that Khnum-mes was a master goldworker (nbj and Hrj nbjw). This fits of course perfectly to the association of New Kingdom temple towns in general, and Sai Island in particular, with gold exploitation in Nubia!
His shabti – as well as the heart scarab – are real master pieces and of very high quality – it is definitely the highlight of AcrossBorders’ excavation in SAC5 since 2015.

As reported yesterday, excavation work now focuses in Tomb 26 on Chamber 5 – Andrea and Marlies are busy cleaning and documented a good number of burials; amulets, beads and scarabs as well as funerary masks are the most common finds in addition to pottery – several intact vessels of various sizes, with so-called flower pots as most frequent type.
Most important and actually very fresh news, having spent a productive Friday of work in Tomb 26: I managed to locate the southern and western walls and also the corresponding corners of Chamber 5! This was of prime importance at this stage, but not an easy task, given the poor quality of sandstone and a large amount of debris on the walls. Some white wall plaster is still preserved in situ – exactly like we found it in the main chamber 2. Fortunately, the dimensions of Chamber 5 are now confirmed, with only the north-western corner left to clean.

Furthermore, registration and documentation was continued this week, reaching the “drawing phase”. Oliver Frank Stephan and Julian Putner arrived at the beginning of the week and started immediately with drawings of small finds and pottery vessels, both from the town and Tomb 26.

A last group of team members will arrive next week – the final reinforcement for the grand finale of our last season and 3 weeks of excavation in the town, at SAV1 East.