Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum

In the final dig diary posting for 2009, I talked about the importance of publishing the results of our work at the site. The first phase of publication is the preliminary report (in English and Arabic) that we are required to submit to Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) each season describing that year’s work. These reports eventually appear in the journal, Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Egypte.

With the gracious permission of Dr. Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the SCA, we are now able to make the English and Arabic reports for the 1996 through 2009 seasons available online as well through the museum’s website.  We hope the reports will be a useful resource for anyone interested in the Mut Precinct and the museum’s work there.

We are in the midst of planning for the next season of fieldwork, scheduled for January-March 2010. Watch for the 2010 Dig Diary, starting in mid-January.

Hieroglyphs for Mut and Sakhmet on the Propylon (main gate) of the Mut Precinct.

The season is over. We finished digging on Tuesday and spent the rest of this week cleaning up, checking notes and taking final photographs. Our major achievements this season were the restoration of the Taharqa Gate and Chapel D and the excavation of part of the area to its west. You are looking at the west face of the gate across the front area of the precinct to Temple A in the background.

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During this past week I continued to treat small finds excavated from the west side of the Taharqa gate, and to watch the progress of the stabilization and rebuilding of the south wing of the gate. In his last blog entry, Richard wrote about the processing of the hundreds of pottery sherds dug up over the course of the season. Occasionally there are enough sherds from a single vessel to reconstruct it, and for me there is a certain zen-like satisfaction in assembling these 3-D puzzles. In the picture on the left, I’m sorting through pieces looking for possible joins, and I’m using the sand-filled tubs to prop up the pieces that I’ve already glued together. The adhesive of choice in this case is the ever-useful Paraloid B-72 acrylic resin. Pictured on the right is part of a large, double-handled vessel with white slip decoration that I put together.

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It’s hard to believe that the season is almost over: this was our last full week of work, and it has been hot. Still, we finally reached the level of the paving west of the Taharqa Gate. In the center and north the paving is fairly well-preserved. On the south, however, it has been widely robbed out. Directly above the paving lies about 50 cm of fairly compact soil (although still with considerable amounts of pottery) that built up over the years and was probably a walking surface. Built on this level is the mud brick wall mentioned last week that forms the southern boundary of the area. (more…)

Late last week we uncovered the top of a fairly substantial mud brick wall running across the Taharqa Gate square (left), but we only had its north face. On Saturday we opened a new area to the south of this square, hoping to find the wall’s south face. (more…)