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He was one of 20 SCA inspectors, selected from among their peers throughout Egypt, for an intensive eight-week field school cosponsored by AERA, the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), USAID and the SCA. Like many degreed professionals trained in Egyptology, the SCA inspectors have studied language, history, and art. And although some of them have excavated with foreign missions, the SCA encouraged them to bridge the gap between archaeological training and professional responsibility by attending a formal course in the field.
Field school directors, Mohsen Kamel and Ana Tavares integrated the field school with our regular excavations to better convey concepts in systematic, interdisciplinary archaeology. Students learned exacting, modern archaeological excavation and recording techniques. The inaugural season’s curriculum included human osteology (study of human bones), archaeobotony (ancient plant remains), zooarchaeology (animal bones), ceramics, object recording, mapping, and surveying. Systematic archaeology
We assumed no prior knowledge of archaeology on the part of our students, nor did we assume limits to learning. We gave every student a copy of the Museum of London Archaeological Service (MoLAS) Manual. They also received an adaptation of the Giza Plateau Mapping Project (GPMP) field manual in English and Arabic. At the end of training, they returned to their jobs as inspectors equipped with the manuals, a set of excavation tools, and a solid foundation in basic archaeological skills that included:
During the field school, the students rose every day in the cold Cairo dawn to work side-by-side with professional AERA archaeologists at the GPMP excavation of the Lost City of the Pyramids. At the beginning of the season, we were buffeted by wind and sand on cold and rainy days. Then we endured days of unseasonably warm, Khamaseen-like weather. (the Khamaseen—“fifty” in Arabic—are the 50 days of potentially bad sand storms that generally begin around late March.) Through it all the spirits of the students remained very high. When the weather broke, the days turned beautiful, and everyone was happy to be working on site. The students excavated pottery, animal bone, human burials, and mud sealings, some with the royal names of the pharaohs Khafre (2520-2494 BC) and Menkaure (2490-2472 BC). Not just diggingAll field school units spent a full week working with material culture specialists in the AERA storeroom. They learned basic recording, sorting, and drawing techniques. Specialized skills were taught by:
Each day ended with course work and evening lectures by a different specialist. AERA Director, Mark Lehner, lectured on landscape and geomorphology, using Giza as an example, where landscape and geology held important clues to the location of the pyramid settlement. The next morning we went to the top of the knoll above our site, the Gebel Qibli (“Southern Mount”) of the Maadi Formation, and looked down on the quarries of the Mokkatam Formation, the possible locations of delivery areas, builder’s ramps, a harbor, and a town. Landscape and geology offer important information about a site; information that requires no excavation. Our purpose was to introduce this kind of information to the field school students. Other evening lecture topics included:
A field trip
One Thursday, students and instructors boarded a bus for a field trip to el-Nazla in the Fayum, a hillside potters’ community. The visit introduced the students to ethno-archaeology. Ethnography is the study and description of culture. Applied to archaeology, ethno-archaeologists attempt to understand and interpret archaeological sites and features by looking at living examples of similar sites or features. El-Nazla is one of the few places where potters still shape vessels by hand with hammer and paddle. It is also one of the few places where modern Egyptian potters still use the ancient technique of mixing chaff temper with the clay, a common feature we find in the fragments of bread molds and beer jars that litter our site at the Giza Plateau. The field school students were assigned a series of questions:
The instructors also posed questions about specific details:
We spent a long day with the potters of el-Nazla, who could not have been more accommodating and hospitable. The day ended with a picnic on the lawn of the SCA Inspectorate at the Graeco-Roman town site of Karanis, whose ruins we visited in the raking light of late afternoon. (Thanks to the Fayum Field School and Dr. Willecke Wendrich for the field trip idea and questionnaire.) Graduation
At the end of the field school season, Secretary General
of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Dr. Zahi Hawass, shook
hands with each student in a ceremony arranged by ARCE’s
Shari Saunders. ARCE Director, Dr. Gerry Scott, presented the graduates
with a certificate of completion, and, in his remarks to the
2005 class, Dr. Hawass expressed great pride at their hard
work and success. Through the sustained efforts of our staff, our instructors, and the evening lecturers, and because of the enthusiastic, serious dedication of the students, our first-ever field school was a decided success. Our goal is to bring a selection of the students back to Giza next season as interns.
In addition, we had four trainees from the Giza Pyramids Inspectorate, who did not work with the four Field School units, but who circulated or worked full time with our regular excavations. The Giza trainees were:
Evening lecturers
Special thanks to Dr. Salima Ikram for taking over the faunal teaching on short notice. Translators
Supreme Council of Antiquities The Giza Field School would not have been possible without Dr. Zahi Hawass' enthusiastic support. We also thank Sabry Abd al-Aziz, General Director of Pharaonic Monuments, for his keen interest in the field school, including his on-site visits and lectures. We are grateful to Atef Abu Dahab, Director of Giza and Saqqara and Adel Hussein, Director of Giza for their support and lectures to the field school. Mansour Bouraik, Chief Inspector of Giza, gave us extra assistance in his official capacity at Giza, in addition to serving as Field School Unit Supervisor, lecturer, translator, good friend, and advisor. We thank Mohammed Shiha for his support as senior Inspector of the Giza Pyramids during Mansour Bouraik’s absence. We thank Abeer Abdallah Bakri for serving as the inspector representing the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) for the field school. USAID This activity was made possible through support provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development, under the terms of Award No. 263-A-00-04-00018-00. The opinions expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Agency for International Development.  |
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