The Khentkawes Town (KKT) - Ancient Egypt Research Associates

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Figure 28. The northern enclosure wall of the KKT, completely
scoured down to bedrock along the KKT-N on the west,
continued to the east beyond the corner with the eastern
enclosure wall and beyond a bedrock edge. The foundation of
the wall extends as a bedrock projection and marl-plastered
mudbrick. View to the west.
sandy overburden 10.70 m farther south and found the
continuation of the western mudbrick wall of the buried
building (fig. 29).
In 2008 Mark Lehner and Kasia Olchowska supervised
the removal of the sandy overburden between the northern
and southern 2007 trenches. A principal goal was to find
how the lower building related to the eastern end of the
Khentkawes causeway. As far as we knew from the 2007
work, the causeway ends abruptly at the bedrock edge. In
2007 we ascertained that the causeway, 1.72 m wide, is a
later entrance at this edge, replacing an earlier entrance
into a corridor, 2.38 m wide, with a door that fitted into
a large limestone pivot socket on the north, and a large
jamb on the south (fig. 30). In either phase, how did
people ascend from the floor level of the lower building
up over the bedrock face to this eastern threshold of the
Khentkawes Town
In 2007 the area immediately east of the causeway
threshold showed a mass of compact mud that banked
Figure 29. Ana Tavares steps down into the southernmost of
two trenches that Lisa Yeomans excavated through the sand
to the lower-lying mudbrick building during 2007. View to the
northwest.
up against the bedrock face, several centimeters below
the upper edge of the bedrock. Patches of silty soil that
overlapped the more compact mudmass appeared to have
been thrown up from a series of pits and shallow trenches
from earlier, albeit modern, digging. In 2007 Yeomans
and Collet had begun a shallow trench extending
eastward, about on line with the causeway, with an eye
to any evidence that a path continued eastward from the
threshold of the Khentkawes causeway at or near the level
of the top of the bedrock ledge.
The first task of an all-too-short 2008 season was to
continue this trench to salvage any information about the
path that led away to the east from the causeway threshold,
and then sort out the sequence of the previous modern
cuts and deposits (figs. 30–31). This trench showed neither
structural remains, nor layers that we could reasonably
relate to the ancient access into the causeway, which ends
abruptly at the bedrock drop. Finally, all we could hope
for in the short season was to expose and map that part
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Giza Plateau Mapping Project Season 2008 Preliminary Report