The Khentkawes Town (KKT) - Ancient Egypt Research Associates

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Introduction
Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA)’s 2008
fieldwork included projects at three of Egypt’s most
famous archaeological sites: Giza, Saqqara, and Luxor.
We carried out the Salvage Archaeological Field School
(SAFS) in Luxor with the American Research Center in
Egypt (ARCE) and Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities
(SCA) in order to both train SCA archaeologists in the realworld
tension between urban development and archaeology,
and to work with them to save as much archaeological
information as possible in excavations on the Avenue
of the Sphinxes in the site of the Khaled Ibn el-Waleed
Garden as part of a broader project for urban and tourist
development. The SAFS worked from January through
March, with up to 150 archaeologists, students, workers,
and support staff. During March, AERA directed major
excavations and archaeological mapping projects in both
Upper and Lower Egypt as the SAFS overlapped with our
work at Giza.
At Giza, AERA worked in the Khentkawes Town (KKT)
and at the site of the Menkaure (Third Pyramid) Valley
Temple from March 1 until April 24, 2008. Because of a
high water table, AERA did not excavate in our flagship
Lost City site south of the Wall of the Crow (which we refer
to in short as HeG, after Heit el-Ghurab, Wall of the Crow
in Arabic). But we launched our Archaeological Science
Program, where up to 30 specialists in ceramics, botany,
zoology, lithics, and artifacts analyzed material culture
from our excavations in the Lost City as a coordinated team
focused on specific areas in line for final publication.
At Saqqara, AERA collaborated with the SCA and a
Japanese consortium that included Osaka University, the
Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the Ancient Orient
Museum to survey and map the entire Djoser Step Pyramid
using laser scanning and three-dimensional modeling between
late May and early June. We helped produce this
highly detailed and accurate record of Egypt’s oldest pyramid
ahead of major SCA restoration work that necessarily
changed and masked large parts of the original fabric
of this world heritage monument.
In May and June, AERA established at our Giza headquarters
the Report Writing Tutorial for senior Egyptian
supervisors of the SAFS. These graduates of the AERA/ARCE
field schools worked with AERA field school instructors
James Taylor and Freya Sadarangani to produce from the
SAFS/Luxor excavation records a report for publication
as a special supplement to the official SCA archaeological
journal, Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Égypt
(ASAE).
In Giza Occasional Papers 4 we summarize the 2008
work at Giza and Saqqara. We present new discoveries at
the Khentkawes Town and the Menkaure Valley Temple, a
preliminary scientific analysis of the osteological material
from the Khentkawes Town, and a report on the Saqqara
Laser Scanning Survey, which included a unique method
of “capturing” all the complexities and detail of a gigantic
monument and mapping the whole in three dimensions.
Giza Occasional Papers 4 7