The Khentkawes Town (KKT) - Ancient Egypt Research Associates

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Figure 20. Mike House and Kelly Wilcox excavate round sockets for ceramic vessels sunk through overlaying silty floors and down
into a crushed marl bedding. People who inhabited the Vestibule installed the jars around the alabaster column bases. View to the
southeast.
(fig. 20). Their work revealed a complex and long-lived
occupation, with an intricate sequence of floors and wall
remodeling. They excavated to the foundation of one
column base and found it has a roughly finished “skirt”
embedded in marl and limestone chips over which
occupants laid several floors of alluvial silt during the
course of their occupation (fig. 21). The floor was well
kept and resurfaced various times. A series of storage jars
were set into the floor when people occupied the temple
vestibule. People made a number of pot emplacements
in these floors, cutting down into the foundation layer.
One contained a nearly intact vessel. Both Reisner and
Hassan had excavated houses within the Menkaure Valley
Temple. The village that developed within this temple
spans 300 years, from the time when our main site south
of the Wall of the Crow was occupied to the end of the Old
Kingdom.
Fairman and House extended the half-section north
from the temple vestibule to the Ramp (fig. 19a). Then
they linked it to a long north-south section through the
road surfaces of the Ramp (fig. 15). This showed that the
Ramp was repaired and resurfaced. They found that the
uppermost layers from resurfacing the Ramp are later
than the render run, or seal, up against the bottom of the
plastered northern face of the Vestibule northern wall,
which means those surfaces were laid down later, but the
Ramp and Vestibule must have functioned together in at
least the later phases of occupation.
Fairman and House found plastered floors that lipped
up to both earlier and later internal faces of the eastern
wall of the Vestibule. They cut back a section in the inner
face of the eastern Vestibule wall and found that it has been
thickened with rebuilds and additions (fig. 19a). A major
additional wall with a rubble-filled core thickened the
wall and reduced the interior space. Altogether, successive
remodeling thickened this wall’s interior by 1.69 m. Along
with the thickening of the external wall forming a kind
of glacis, the Vestibule came to be embedded in a mass of
mudbrick. The excavators noted: “…one likely explanation
for (the internal accretion) may be that following the
removal or reuse of the columns, a smaller internal space
needed to be created in order to support a roof” (Fairman
2008: 2).
Water Tank 2
Water Tank 2 is a north-south rectangular basin cut into
the bedrock, surrounded by fieldstone walls retaining
a rubble core. This created a series of steps, or narrow
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