The Khentkawes Town (KKT) - Ancient Egypt Research Associates

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Later Wall
Fill
Later
Wall
Cut through
limestone debris
Fill
Bedrock
Figure 12. Dan Jones points to a wide foundation of a mudbrick wall built upon bedrock with two outer faces and a rubble-filled
core in the northern Trench A. A thinner, later wall flanked by fill rests upon the older foundation. View to south.
To sort this out, Daniel Jones took on the task of
recording relationships between the upper and lower
terraces, and the cut along this interface. Jones excavated
two small trenches, A and B, down the line of this interface
(figs. 9, 11, 12). In both trenches he discovered that builders
founded segments of mudbrick walls along this common
alignment on a prepared bedrock surface that extends
westward under the limestone debris comprising the
upper terrace. The surface in Trench B, to the south, is 30
to 40 cm lower than in Trench A due to the natural southsoutheast
dip of the natural limestone strata. When the
quarrymen removed blocks from the harder limestone
layers prior to the building of the town, they followed the
yellowish clay-rich beds, because these layers are softer
and it is easier to cut out blocks from the intervening
harder layers. By this practice they followed the natural
geological dip to the south-southeast.
In both Trenches A and B, Jones found that the
builders cut into the limestone fill of the upper, western
terrace to found the mudbrick walls, so that fill layer must
have existed somewhat farther east before they erected
the mudbrick walls flush against the vertical cut through
the debris. It might be the case that the builders did not
so much create the upper western terrace for the foot of
the KKT by dumping limestone quarry debris for that
purpose, as they leveled the lower eastern edge of the huge
mound of such debris that fills the entire rectangular area
between the east-west leg of the KKT and the GIII.VT. That
is, they cut into the debris to level it and to make the step
down from the higher to the lower terraces. Our work
this season shows that people also cut the debris back for
building the extramural houses west of the southern end
of the KKT foot, probably in a later phase.
In the northern Trench A, the first phase wall [21,888]
consists of two thick mudbrick faces with a rubble core,
wider at bottom (fig. 12). The wall [29,957] in the southern
Trench B is entirely brick-built. Within Trenches A and B
Jones found no additions to the wall, such as the render
seen farther north (fig. 10), which suggested the limestone
debris there did bank against an earlier standing wall after
masons plastered its western face.
Jones found evidence that the occupants of the
settlement repaired these walls. In both trenches he
discovered a cut [29,324] where they removed limestone
debris of the upper terrace fill for a width of 60 cm, sloping
their cut down to the east to expose the western face of
wall [21,888]. They filled gaps in the wall, “tuck-pointing”
with rubble (pottery, stone, charcoal), then re-smoothed
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Giza Plateau Mapping Project Season 2008 Preliminary Report