Fieldwork – Page 3 – The Kelsey Blog

“This Quintessence of Dust”: Micro-Debris Analysis at Olynthos

1 Comment / Archaeological Research, Fieldwork / June 5, 2014

BY ELINA SALMINEN, PhD student, Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology, University of Michigan

Enthusiasm #2 Photo taken my Matt, from whom I sha — Processing of the residue from wet-sieving on site.

This summer, the University of Michigan will be starting a new archaeological project at Olynthos in northern Greece in collaboration with the 16th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities, the British School at Athens, and the University of Liverpool. The goal of the project is to excavate two 4th-century BCE houses and improve our understanding of ancient domestic spaces as well as northern Greek cities. In preparation for the summer, I traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia, to learn about micro-debris analysis, a technique we will be using at our excavation. It was a busy two days with Lynn Rainville, a micro-debris expert based at Sweetbriar College. We discussed the potential of the technique and devised a plan for how to apply it in the field.

In short, micro-debris consists of the small inclusions that are present in the dirt we excavate but are rarely noticed by the excavator. These inclusions can range from beads to small bones (especially from animals like rodents or fish) to very small fragments of pottery. Even though these finds seem mundane, they are worth studying for several reasons, especially in a domestic context. Imagine sweeping a compact dirt floor. What will be removed, and what will stay put? Research has shown that small fragments are more likely to remain where they fall, and can therefore give us a more accurate picture about the use of spaces when they were inhabited instead of after abandonment (which is when most of the bigger “finds” are deposited — archaeologists are often quite literally excavating through trash pits!). The technique can also allow us to see activities that might not otherwise be visible because they left little evidence, and to accurately compare the density of finds in different areas due to the careful counting and measuring involved.

The method itself can be quite tedious! After an excavator collects a soil sample for analysis of an area that seems interesting, the dirt is literally washed in a barrel to get rid of small grains of sand — in archaeological lingo this is known as flotation or wet-sieving.

29714238471 — View of the flotation barrel.

In the process, botanical remains like burnt seeds will float to the surface and will be collected for analysis by specialists. The rest of the sample will be carefully picked through and searched for archaeological materials. The finds will then be sorted by type, counted, and weighed.

It is only after all this that analysis can begin.

Despite the slow and often boring sorting that is involved, it will hopefully be worthwhile in the end. We have come a long way from removing dirt by the cartful to expose monumental buildings with little regard to their contents and the people who used them. Using micro-debris analysis alongside multiple other methods, the project at Olynthos aims to study how different spaces were used in ancient houses, and even how these uses changed depending on the time of day or the season. Even though it might not look like much at first glance, micro-debris can help us get at the hustle and bustle of ancient houses behind the stone wall foundations that are visible to the visitor now.

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Burning Questions about Greek Sacrifice

1 Comment / Archaeological Research, Fieldwork / May 19, 2014

BY DAN DIFFENDALE, PhD student, Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology, University of Michigan

Archaeologists study the (often-broken) material remains of human behavior in hopes of answering questions about human life in the past. We cannot directly access the past; we are constrained to form hypotheses and narratives on the basis of materials that exist in the present and are observable through excavation or surface survey. One category of hypothesis creation and testing is that of experimental archaeology (sometimes included among “actualistic” approaches). Archaeologists attempt to replicate past human behaviors in order to observe the resulting material signature, which can be compared with the archaeological record.

As a member of the Mt. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project in Greece, I helped to excavate an ancient Greek mountaintop altar. This “ash altar” was built up over centuries by the accumulation of many thousands of animal bones burned by Greek worshipers in honor of the god Zeus. Although specialist studies of the bones and of the altar sediments have told us a great deal about the sacrificial practice at Mt. Lykaion in antiquity, many questions remain open.

Since 2012 I have collaborated with Jacob Morton of the University of Pennsylvania to create an experimental ash altar in Athens, Greece, built up out of the remains of dozens of sheep thighbones and tails, burned according to current hypotheses about Greek sacrifice. In mid-May we will carefully excavate the accumulation of one and a half years of experimental burning, in order to compare the material record of these processes with the observed archaeological record at Mt. Lykaion. In addition to this goal, the “Burning Questions” project, as we call it, includes observation of the sensory experience of the burnt offering part of Greek sacrificial ritual as well as the behavior of burning tails, which the Greeks observed as omens.

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We Call It the Silo Building Complex

Leave a Comment / Fieldwork / May 5, 2014

BY RICHARD REDDING, Research Scientist, Kelsey Museum, blogging from Giza, Egypt

We discovered an Old Kingdom mud-brick building two years ago while clearing sand. It is located just south of the Khafre Valley Temple and separated from the tombs and pyramids by a large stone wall. As we cleared away the sand from the tops of the walls, one of the first things we found was a series of five silos — hence, the Silo Building Complex (SBC). Due to lack of time in 2012 we did not get to really excavate into the building except in two rooms on the eastern edge. We filled the area with clean sand and left it for the future.

This season (2014) we decided to explore this building. We had several questions:

How old was it? Did it go back to the reign of Khafre? We did have one seal impression from Niuserre, a 5th Dynasty pharaoh.
What was the building used for, and who occupied it?
Is the depression to the west really a harbor?
Could the SBC access the area to the north?

To answer these questions we excavated in four areas of the SBC. The first was two of the silos, which we knew would contain information on diet.

redding1 — The SBC on Saturday, 19 April. The large silos are very visible, and two have been excavated. To the right (east) are two rooms excavated in 2011. To the left (west) is a room excavated this season (photo R. Redding).

redding2-3 — Two photos of the silos. Note how high the walls still stand. The small semicircular cut in one is the remnant of the access door (photos R. Redding).

We also excavated a room on the western edge of the building. We wanted good floor deposits and to check on a blocked doorway that led to the west from the SBC.

redding4 — Excavated room. Note the Meidum bowl set in the floor (photo R. Redding).

The third excavation was a trench from the western room down into the depression we thought might be a harbor. The excavation revealed three terraces that stepped down to an elevation of about 14.5 meters above sea level (m asl). Coring in the west of the water-filled trench revealed a layer of black clayey silt at about 13 m asl. In the Old Kingdom the Nile flood plain at Giza was about 12 m asl, and the flood would have reached about 14 m asl. We have a harbor.

redding5 — Excavation into harbor from western room. Terraces marked (photo R. Redding).

The last area we have excavated is around the stone wall forming a border between the SBC and the area to the north. We found a doorway that was plastered that led through the wall from the SBC.

Finally, we excavated an area of the stone wall to establish the relationship between the SBC and the northern boundary wall. Which was built first?

redding6 — The stone boundary wall. Note doorway in lower left that allowed access from the SBC to the area to the north. The doorway is nicely plastered, and you can see the plaster line (photo R. Redding).

We are finishing the excavations, and we will begin the laboratory analyses soon. A team of ceramicists, a faunal analyst, a lithics analyst, botanist, and objects team will soon start work. In a few weeks I will send out another blog describing what they found.

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From the Field: How Tall Was This Pyramid?

1 Comment / Fieldwork / April 8, 2014

BY GEOFF EMBERLING, Assistant Research Scientist, Kelsey Museum, blogging from his fieldwork site at El Kurru, Sudan

Due to overwhelming demand, I am giving my answer to the question of how tall our pyramid would have been when first built. The angle of the facing stones is about 73 degrees, and if you just do a calculation on that basis (yes, it’s trigonometry), you get a height of about 43 meters.

If you do a more detailed (and accurate) calculation based on the size of the blocks and the setback of each course, you find that the pyramid had about 72 courses of stone and that it was about 34.5 meters high.

These calculations are remarkable partly because the pyramid has a much lower angle now, and it’s only a bit over 9 meters high. So a very rough reconstruction shows what the profile of the pyramid would have looked like originally:

Is that even remotely plausible? Where did all that stone go??
We looked at some nearby sites, and it seems that it is plausible — there are some pyramids at the site of Nuri from about the same period of time that were built of solid stone and have survived better, and they could have been close to 34 meters high. They also have a profile like the one I’ve reconstructed here.

We don’t know where all the stone went … but some of it seems to have been used in the village over the past century or two.

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3D Gabii: (Re)excavating the Past

Leave a Comment / Fieldwork / March 18, 2014

BY MATT NAGLAK, PhD student, U-M Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology

One of the major problems of excavation is its innately destructive nature. Once a layer of dirt is excavated or a stone is removed, it cannot be put back. It is therefore vitally important to obtain all the information possible not only about the layer itself but also its relationship to all the layers around it. Unfortunately, it is not always possible for an archaeologist to know in advance what information is going to be needed to understand the site as a whole. Often no one realizes that significant information has been lost until the excavation is finished and analysis has begun.

In the past, the only way to combat this problem was to take photographs and detailed notes. The Kelsey and IPCAA projects at Gabii and Sant’Omobono, Italy, however, are using new technology to create 3D photomodels of layers that will in a sense let us “reexcavate” the site after the actual digging is finished, recovering valuable data and relationships otherwise lost. One of my jobs on the site of Gabii is to take pictures and then create the 3D models for each of the trenches. Then we are able to look again at the surface of a layer in all its detail, almost as if it had never been removed in the first place. With the click of a mouse we can excavate a trench again or reinsert earlier layers, moving in either direction through time in a way never before possible. This ability has proven invaluable to how we understand the results of excavation and is sure to be a staple of future archaeological work. I am very excited to return to Gabii this summer to continue this innovative work!

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From El Kurru to Ann Arbor: Q&A from the Field

1 Comment / Fieldwork / March 11, 2014

BY GEOFF EMBERLING, Assistant Research Scientist, Kelsey Museum

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 their questions in several posts over the next week or two.

One group of questions was about life in the village.

Is El Kurru considered to be *modern*? For instance, do people have cell phones, furniture, and computers?
Do they have grocery stores?
Is there a citywide call to prayer, and, if so, how does it affect your team and their work schedule?

There are maybe 1,000 people living in El Kurru village (nobody seems to know for sure). The village is modern in some ways. There are four shops on the main street, including Waleed’s grocery store (above), the barber shop where I got my haircut, and a coffee shop that would amaze you — a woman making the delicious local coffee called jebena on coals that rest on the floor, which is sand. So, not a lot of businesses, but there are a few. People drop by the grocery store all day long . . . women sometimes feel more comfortable shopping through a window on the side of the store rather than going inside.

Nearly everyone here has a cell phone . . . one feature they enjoy is an ability to play the radio out loud on their phone while we are all working in the excavation. In fact, Sudanese went from having a pretty minimal wired phone network to a complete mobile phone network in a very short period of time in the last ten years or so, and it is changing everything about working and living in Sudan.

And yes, there are mosques in the village, and we hear calls to prayer throughout the day (with loud calls to prayer starting at 5:45 a.m.!). The person who gives the call to prayer is called a muezzin, and we all have our favorite ones. This is one of the more observant Muslim places I’ve worked, and many people in the village go to the mosque to pray five times a day.

What is a typical work day for your team?
Do you ever take a day off to rest?

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 too as you can see.

It gets light here around 7 a.m. We get ready, have our tea and coffee, and start work at 8 a.m. We have hired around 70 local men to help with the excavation, and most of them prefer to work from 8 to 2 even though it gets hot here in the afternoon (it’s recently been between 95 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the afternoons).

We eat according to a Sudanese schedule: “breakfast” is a big meal at 11 a.m., and we have “lunch” a bit late for Sudan, at about 6 p.m. They would normally have dinner at 9:30 or so, but we are all too tired, so we have just two main meals. We eat a local, organic, and mostly vegetarian diet — lots of fava beans (called fuul), eggs, tomatoes, and cucumbers, sometimes pancakes with savory sauces, and bread with everything. And we eat Sudanese style, with our right hand, mostly using little pieces of bread to scoop up the food. My personal favorite is the sweet spaghetti they serve with every meal — hard to eat with your hand!

We work six days per week, with Fridays off. We are a pretty active group, though, so we sometimes catch up on work on Fridays, and sometimes drive off to visit other sites in the area, which is important for us.

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Pulled from the Trenches

1 Comment / Archaeological Research, Fieldwork / February 10, 2014

BY GEOFF EMBERLING, Assistant Research Scientist, Kelsey Museum

We are in the final preparations to return to the archaeological site of El Kurru in northern Sudan for a second field season. We have obtained our permissions from the governments of Sudan and the United States, raised funds, gathered an international group of about 25 archaeologists, and purchased and packed all our trowels, notebooks, and computers.

The site is well known to archaeologists as the burial site of many of the “Black Pharaohs,” kings of Kush who conquered Egypt and ruled as its 25th Dynasty from about 725 to 653 BC. They are mentioned in the Bible because they helped defend Jerusalem against the invading Assyrian army in battles around 701 BC, but it was ultimately the Assyrian army that drove them out of Egypt. Kush, however, continued as the major political power in the Middle Nile valley for another 1,000 years or so. As a result of its importance, El Kurru was designated part of a UNESCO World Heritage area, “Gebel Barkal and the Sites of the Napatan Region.”

It will be an unusually exciting season. One of our teams, directed by Prof. Abbas Sidahmed Zarroug, is working to preserve and protect the royal pyramids. Abbas is a Sudanese archaeologist who grew up in the village of El Kurru, and he has a unique perspective on this cultural heritage. Another team, directed by Prof. Rachael Dann of the University of Copenhagen, will be working around the currently known royal burials to identify non-royal burials or perhaps even royal burials missed by earlier archaeologists.

My team, based at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan, will be working to excavate the burial chamber of the largest pyramid at the site and to uncover a “mortuary temple” (temple for a dead king) with mysterious underground chambers (see photo above). We are also investigating the royal city around the cemetery by following remains of what we think is a city wall. We are grateful for major funding from the Qatar-Sudan Archaeological Project; from the National Geographic Society, who will be sending a film crew to document our work; and from Ms. Kathleen Picken.

Note: Keep up to date with this year’s season at El Kurru by following Geoff Emberling’s blog posts at:

http://elkurrukush.blogspot.com/

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Welcome to Karanis: December 2012

Leave a Comment / Fieldwork / November 13, 2012

BY SEBASTIAN ENCINA, Collections Manager, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan

A month has passed since I arrived at Karanis, and work has been progressing well. Several areas are open at the moment, encompassing different sections of the site. The team is working mostly in areas not excavated by the Michigan team in the 1920s, outside the original Michigan boundaries. So far they have been excavating at a granary to the east of the North Temple, a kiln south of the South Temple, and a bathhouse north of the North Temple.

The finds from all sections have been interesting. Plenty of pottery has been found throughout the site, which is not at all surprising. Most of it consists of body sherds, but on occasion the team has found more unusual pieces, including filtered rims and whole vessels.

Glass and terracotta are still appearing. Fragments of a mask, possibly, and fragments of a shrine, potentially, have been excavated at the granary. This trench has also yielded a leather sandal, two large stone basins, and a mortar.

The site of Karanis has been a blessing for scholars for the amounts and types of materials discovered. This includes organics, which are still present: seeds, charcoal, textiles, and animal remains have come up in great numbers. Most interesting of all, though, are the large baskets and rope/cordage found. The weaving patterns used and shapes are reminiscent of those in the Kelsey collections.

There have been a few surprises thus far. The granary team found a pen that could have held animals, but its construction is puzzling. Walls were added that appear to serve no purpose. There is a hole in the wall, but its placement is right behind the newly built wall. Room 1 in the granary has a low-wall bin that seems quite small to have held much.

Unfortunately, one trench, the kiln, lies in the area destroyed by the sebakhim (farmers who dug up mudbricks for reuse). The levels here are disturbed, though they are still yielding plenty of finds. The room has two kilns, one small and one large. Though one glass fragment was found, it is likely this kiln was used for ceramics, as plenty of pottery and slag are found in the trench.

Due to ongoing work at Karanis, I will not be posting pictures of finds, as the team will likely want to publish their materials. However, I can show personal pictures of the site to give the reader a sense of the state of the town. Much has changed since Michigan left in 1935. Buildings that once stood prominently are covered by sand. Walls that towered over workers no longer exist. Wall paintings, decorated niches, dovecotes, arches are no longer visible. Some have been covered by backfill. Some have been claimed by the desert sands. Some have been destroyed by human hands.

When I return to Ann Arbor, I will present additional photographs to show the difference between 1920s Karanis and 2012 Karanis. Most has changed as detailed above. But the images shown here give a glimpse of how some structures remain unchanged.

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Welcome to Karanis: November 2012

Leave a Comment / Fieldwork / October 24, 2012

BY SEBASTIAN ENCINA, Collections Manager, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, University of Michigan

The University of Michigan’s Karanis excavations in the 1920s/1930s profoundly affected numerous departments at the University. Led by Francis Kelsey, the Karanis team collected artifacts that form the core of the collections housed in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. The nearly 50,000 pieces remain a focus of research, exhibition, and outreach despite the fact that Michigan left the site in 1935.

In 2005, Prof. Willeke Wendrich of UCLA procured a permit to excavate at Karanis. Since then, Dr. Wendrich’s teams have continued research at the site to expand our knowledge of Graeco-Roman Egypt, particularly in the provincial areas.

This season, Fall 2012, Dr. Wendrich has been kind enough to extend me an invitation to join the Karanis team in the familiar position of registrar. During my stay here, I will be seeing the freshly excavated materials currently being found at the site and have a chance to compare them to what Kelsey and Enoch Peterson dug up in the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, when I can, I will be writing a blog for the Kelsey Museum to share my experiences and thoughts about the current state of Karanis.

I’ve already spent two days at the site and have marveled at its sheer size and condition. Though the Kelsey Museum holds the original plans and maps, the chance to see it in person has given me the proper perspective on how vast the site is and how small the rooms actually are. Unfortunately, Karanis no longer stands as it once did. The views of Karanis captured by George Swain and his team of photographers (including Peterson and Easton Kelsey) are not what the visitor will find today. Many walls have collapsed, many structures no longer stand.

In the coming months, I will update this blog with new findings from the field. As register, I will see all finds come across my desk. I will speak with all the specialists and gather information about those items, and how they compare to the Kelsey’s holdings. I will photograph the site and try to do so from the same angles as Swain. All this I will share with you.

This wouldn’t be possible without the generosity of Dr. Willeke Wendrick and Kelsey Director Dr. Sharon Herbert. To both of them I owe a great deal of gratitude.

Until next time, back out into the field.

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