Today was a great day. We got to
the excavation and set up right away. Dr. Tata began on the field school right
away. Our inspectors in the field school are so bright and caught onto
examining textiles right away. Dr. Tata and Kristin South are good teachers and
they are very good students.
One of the first things they did
was examine a small mummy. This mummy was beautifully wrapped in a tunic and
with other nice wrappings. There was some evidence that they tried much of the
full mummification process. The toes and toenails and brain and tongue were
amazingly preserved. We found a wonderful necklace and two bracelets on each
arm. The jewelry makes us think it was a girl, but we cannot tell. Assuming it
was, this little girl was about 18 months old when she passed away. She was
buried with great care as someone who obviously loved her very much did all
they could to take care of this little girl in burial. Very sad. But they
succeeded, it was a beautiful burial. She had been buried with several other
mummies, so we are interested in examining them.
We also practiced washing
textiles. They want us to clean some of the textiles we have in the permanent
storage facilities. However, they are so nice we did not want to wash them
without having practiced. Today we chose some textiles we were going to rebury
and practiced washing and soaking them, experimenting with how much water to
use, how many times to rinse, how much pressure can be applied while washing with
a brush, how brittle they were after drying, whether or not we could unfold and
flatten them easier while they were wet, etc. We practiced on both linen and
wool. Kristin South headed up this effort, assisted a little by Kerry
Muhlestein but a lot by Gabr, who has a delicate touch and a real feel for
ancient textiles. We feel we had great success in doing this. We were quite
astonished at the result, and believe we can do some excellent work with any of
our textiles. This was a very fruitful activity. We will see how they fare
after a full day of drying, and will do some more practicing tomorrow.
Dr. Evans did a lot of
osteological work today. Dr. Whitchurch and Dr. Muhlestein worked on a number
of things. We cleaned up and inventoried some of the facilities. We photographed
some amazing Roman Glass and the various pieces of metal found on the baby
mummy.
We cleaned off the Snefru Stela and started measuring and photographing
it as we prepare it for publication. We pieced together a few things we were
unsure of before. We were not able to finish, but we made some good progress.
Tomorrow is our last day of going
to the cemetery. It is hard to believe we are winding down like that already.
Time goes by so slowly when I think about my family, but so fast in regards to
the work here.
Spent the evening making certificates of graduation for our field school participants.
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