22nd
A day under cover!
Sunday 21st August 2011
With the temperature still warm, we took advantage of a day in the storeroom at Quesna. There was much work to be done arranging material for photography, analysis and drawing, which will all be done during the course of the fieldschool when specialists will be coming and going! We also started work on the reconstruction of part of the rim of one of the ceramic coffins that was drawn by Ashraf last week and the next task is to sort through the remaining pieces of ceramic coffins that have not yet been re-assembled, in order that we can start to work on these, with the help of our Egyptian conservator in September. Once everything is completed, Ashraf will be able to draw the last few vessel-type and tray-type coffins and then photographs will be made ready for the publication.
This afternoon two of our colleagues from Cairo and Luxor arrived at Quesna train station just as we were heading home at 2pm. They will join us on the ground survey from tomorrow. The next few days will be spent re-visiting the sites that we went to on the ground survey in the spring, starting tomorrow with Kom Usim. We are hoping that some of the land will be clear of crops in order that we may be able to conduct at least limited field-walking. Generally there are very small windows of opportunity when the fields are briefly cleared between crops, to be able to walk over the land and take a closer look at surface ceramics - and possibly other material - and we are hoping to have that chance tomorrow!
Once we returned to Shibin el-Kom today we went to see two more appartments. One will be home to a number of the inspectors who will join us for the fieldschool and who live outside Minufiyeh province, and the other will firstly be the home to our prehistoric survey team, and after that, to colleagues coming in from Germany and the UK, as well as Egypt. Thankfully the appartments were most suitable, and we are just waiting for the fans to be brought in!
Reconstructing the rim of one of the ceramic vessel-type coffins
