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Saturday: Planning the
Excavation Arriving early at
the site
Work begins early at our new excavation: we rise at 4:30 and try to arrive at the site by 6:00. Our custom is to work until 10:30 when we pause for a light “second” breakfast. We continue to work until 14:00 when we break for the day and return to camp for lunch, our most substantial meal of the day. After lunch each of our members retire to their respective chores: the trench supervisors begin to collate the daily reports, while the team members alternately work on final preparation of unit sheets, data entry in the various databases, or attending the daily lectures on all aspects of excavation. At 19:00 we have a light supper (often soup or pasta) and afterwards the trench supervisors consult the inspectors and trench excavators and discuss the days events. Top plans are finalized and the daily report is formed with input from all members of the team, each of whom keep their own daily excavation notes.  On this first day the group took a tour of Hamra to familiarize themselves with the site’s layout. Then the groups discussed which areas should be excavated, and why. The identification of the to be excavated areas was done with the help of the results of a magnetic map. From the computer generated map it seemed that one area would contain a building (trench 01) and another was characterized by strong magnetic anomalies, possibly ovens or kilns (trench 02). After forming an initial excavation plan, the group returned to camp, and in the evening the director, Dr. Willeke Wendrich lectured on the site and on what will occur in the first week of excavation. Sunday: Initial Observations QH Trench 01, a 5 x 5 meter trench was located in the southwest corner of the site (the dimensions were later expanded to 6 x 6, but this will be discussed later). The reasons for opening this trench were based on the magnetic survey of the site, which shows substantial walls, part of a large building in this area. Some initial observations about the surface of the trench were made: the middle of the trench was covered with windblown sand, the NE corner held a concentrated deposit of thick pottery sherds, and the NW corner was covered with windblown sand mixed with thin pottery sherds. These observations led us to hypothesize that this location may have been a storage or industrial complex, perhaps part of a large house. These suggestions were based on the thickness of the wall that appeared in the magnetic map and also the concentrations of sherds that lead us to think it may be communal storage. The supervisors of this trench were Mohsen Kamel and Afifi Rohayem, and team members were Anwar Ahmad, Yusri el Sayed and Samhan Mohamad. The morning was also spent practicing taking elevations using the dumpy level.  QH Trench 02 was laid out just southeast of Trench 01. A grid system had previously been established over this newly discovered site of el-Qarah el-Hamra, in an area that is under development for the growth of olive trees. The least disturbed south-west portion of the site is 200 x 140 meters in size. Our magnetic survey of this gridded area indicated the presence of dark circular anomalies below the surface, which the director believed could indicate kiln sites. Our 5 x 5 trench was located directly over three of these anomalies. The laying out of the trench and initial top plans was supervised by Tonny deWit, who would later join the soil sampling team at Karanis. Trench supervisors were Mohsen Kamel and Kandace Pansire, and team members were Ashraf Subhi Rizq Allah, Mahmoud Ahmed Hillal, Ahmed Ismael, and Eric Wells.  Hamra team left to
right: Yusri el Sayed, Afifi Rohayem, Anwar Ahmad, Mahmoud Ahmed
Hillal, Samhan Mohamad, Mohsen Kamel, Ashraf Subhi Rizq Allah, Ahmed
Ismael (not shown: Eric Wells and Kandace Pansire)
Pottery sherds were visible on the surface of Trench 02, as well as what appeared to be fired mudbrick (this later turned out to be very coarse ceramic, typical for this trench). All soil layers were sieved, and all material uncovered in the excavation of this trench (ceramic, botanical remains, bone, iron fragments, etc.) were carefully labeled and brought back to camp for inclusion in the finds database and for further study. Two coins were found on the surface (unit 0001). After returning to camp, the evening consisted of a lecture detailing how to properly fill in unit sheets.  Tuesday: Drawing Top Plans Our third day of excavation began with cleaning of the trenches, as a rain shower the night before had blown a great deal of sand into the trench, obscuring much of the previous two days’ work. The weather was against us a few times this season, with especially high winds that covered the trenches almost as soon as we cleaned them. Trench 01: the team continued to draw top plans of the surface, which had been separated into the three units mentioned above; the proper methods of drawing top plans had been on the curriculum Monday. Some fired bricks were found in unit 0002, the northeast portion of the trench. The top course of a mudbrick wall (unit 0010) was discovered running north-south the full length of the trench in the west. The upper course of the wall was decayed and individual bricks could not be distinguished; this may be due to the fact that this area of the site was at some point under the lake, which reached much higher levels in the past than at present. Another mudbrick wall abutting wall 0010 to the east was uncovered and labeled 0006. A thick layer of windblown sand south of wall 0006 contained much thin and thick pottery, as well as small pieces of wood. An area of ash was noted in the southeast corner of the trench (unit 0009).  In Trench 02 the director, along with inspector Mahmoud and team member Eric Wells, located what appeared to be fired brick in a circular formation. This feature would later be identified as a probable kiln due to its high ash content and iron fragments associated with it. Wednesday: Excavating Walls Trench 01: North of wall 0006 is an area of light brown sand containing many pottery sherds and a few pieces of fired brick. From this area a small copper-alloy coin was recovered. During removal of this sand it was found to run quite deep. Cleaning of the area revealed several more mudbrick features: 0008 in the northeast corner running east-west, and 0016 running north-south. These two features appear to represent a door jamb and this entire portion of the trench may have had a storage function. Abutting wall 0006 and positioned north-south is unit 0021, a mudbrick feature parallel to 0010. 0021 and 0016 would seem to have, at one point, formed a single wall running north-south, but there is a gap between the two features. In this gap we found a large amount of scattered brick; probably this was part of the original wall, and that had collapsed.  Trench 02: 4 units down we located an extremely diffuse layer of soil that seemed to be mixed with the layers above and below it. It also contained a large amount of melted mudbrick. As we discussed above, this area must have been heavily inundated when the lake levels rose and many of the mudbrick elements have melted and cover large portions of the site, especially at the southern edge. This has left us with a complex stratigraphy, with many layers intermingling. In some cases it was difficult to tell where one unit ended and another began. For this reason, inspectors Ashraf Subhi Rizq Allah, Ahmed Ismael and Mahmoud Ahmed Hillal made extensive and numerous top plans of all major changes in the trench. Some blue faience was recovered but in very small amounts; iron fragments began appearing at a larger number. Thursday: Thanksgiving  Trench 01: The note book started with stating "More wind last night (seems to be a pattern)." After clearing the windblown sand, work continued in the southeast corner of the trench and a new feature was discovered: 0012 appeared to be another mudbrick wall extending from the northwest to the southeast, the upper course of which was badly decayed. Trench 02: A good portion of one of our diffused layers blew away in the night. Underneath, however, in the southwest corner of the trench appeared the eroded remains of a mudbrick wall, highly water damaged with no individual bricks evident in the top layers. This small portion of the wall was about 0.5 meter south of the kiln. After we returned to camp for the night, we all sat down together for a Thanksgiving dinner, lavishly bestowed upon us by supportive friends from Cairo, who knew exactly what a hard working excavation team needs at times like these. |
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