10th
5th to 7th April 2011
One of the last tea breaks of the season - visiting a friend in Khatabah!
The season drew to a close on 7 April and, as always, the last few days of work were hectic, and included report writing, and packing up things in the flat in Shibin and returning everything to the storage facility. On 5 April, we spent the day with Ashraf Senussi, looking at the ceramics from this season and then making photographs of all of the diagnostic sherds that have been drawn. Ashraf chooses one of each type of vessel to describe in detail, analyse and draw and then he will list the number of other occurrences of the same type. He has managed to get through all of our material - which is very good news! We even finished looking at all of the ceramics sherds (some of only millimetres in size) on Thursday up at Quesna, and were able to give at least broad date ranges to much of the material, which helps to provide even more data on the date ranges of the sites and more information as to which sites might usefully be investigated more extensively in the future.
A brief visit was made to the desert edge in the region of el-Khatabah on Wednesday and we are looking forward to starting the systematic surface survey here in August with colleagues from Auckland. As with so many places in Egypt, the land is under pressure, and we will work quickly in the summer to recover as much information as possible and target future areas for 2012. On Wednesday after work we also had a pleasant visit from two colleagues, one from the local SCA and one from the university in Shibin el-Kom and we all ate together, enjoying again the famous fateer that we have seen much of during this brief season.
On Thursday we organised equipment in the storage facility as this was our official last day of work and the subsequent days have been spent checking notes, making lists of actions to be taken before we return - hopefully in greater numbers - in the summer season, and also of the sites to re-visit and work to be undertaken during August, September and October. Everyone is most excited about the prospect of a summer school in Minufiyeh - our first - and we hope that everything works out well for this!
It has been our briefest season to date but also very successful. It was particularly important to me that the season should take place at this time and it has proven that everything is very much as usual in respect of our work in Minufiyeh. Our colleagues have been very welcoming, as have the inhabitants of the three main areas in which we have worked. Everyone is very interested in what we have been doing and looking forward to our return visits in the summer to conduct surface survey when the fields in the region of el-Rimaly, Sobek el-Dahak and Kom Usim will be clear. This should provide still further information, and next year we hope to be able to look at another small number of sites and apply the same methods as we have done this year, to build up an ever clearer picture of the region. It was also most rewarding that the SCA/EES Delta Survey Workshop went ahead as it proved to be a great arena for discussion between colleagues from Egypt and all different countries, and really showed how much we have progressed even in the short time since the last Delta Workshop and this has helped in terms of further collaborations and priorities for the coming years. We look forward to returning to Minufiyeh in August!
