Hopkins excavation uncovers a queen

When Professor Betsy Bryan and her team were excavating in Egypt, the aerial photographs they took of the temple site revealed a light line running in a rectangle across the ground. Thinking it was an architectural structure of some sort because of its regularity, the team of Hopkins students, along with Egyptian workers, began digging to uncover it, said Bryan, a professor in the Near Eastern Studies department.

"We got really excited that we'd find something interesting, something new," she said. "But we dug it and it turned out to be a modern trench for water pipes."

The confluence of the ancient past with the modern reality that often disrupts it is one of the challenges of archaeology, Bryan said.

Bryan traveled to Luxor, Egypt, this January to continue excavations on the Mut Temple Precinct, where she has worked for the past six years. A photographer and several graduate and undergraduate students from Hopkins came with her on the dig.

The temple was built in honor of the female goddess Mut, and one of Bryan's goals during this year was to discover more about what the temple looked like and the details of the ritual observance that occurred there.

The most exciting find during this season was a life-sized statue of a queen, most likely Queen Tiye, made of a black material called granodiorite.

However, Jay VanRensselaer, the photographer on the dig, said that it is important to realize that archaeology is not about discovering a statue every season. Nevertheless, the team uncovered a rare statue of an Egyptian queen, believed to have been carved around 1391 B.C.

"A lot of archaeology is a meticulous process," VanRensselaer said. "I work for hours just photographing little diagnostic pieces of pottery, bone, beads. It's not all glory; it's also hard work."

The tools archaeologists use -- a small pick, a trowel, brushes and a bucket to carry dirt -- are made to slow the process down even further. Often it takes a whole day to clear a 10 centimeter level of earth. However, the slow progress is necessary to insure nothing is broken or missed.

Graduate student Adam Maskevich, who plans on pursuing a career in field archaeology, calls archaeology "elegant destruction."

"You're touching something that was last touched by human hands thousands and thousands of years ago," he said. "But to fully understand it, you have to change it, you have to partially destroy it. It's impossible to re-excavate a site."

Much of the time on an archaeological dig is spent measuring levels of finds, drawing pictures, taking photographs and in general trying to at least partially recapture and understand what is destroyed through the excavating process. This documentation adds to the collective knowledge database of archaeologists, and is often the only record that something existed.

For example, a red granite block from the Mut temple used to have an inscription on it,. However, the inscription disintegrated and now its photograph is all that remains, VanRensselaer said.

Although it was sophomore Emily Russo's first time doing archaeology, this January she was put in charge of a five-meter-square trench.

Her job was to record the progress of excavation in her square, along with drawing the important finds, such as a bronze pot and part of a circular granary.

During the three-week excavation, she said that she went through at least 30 pages of notes.

Although Hopkins students and faculty did the recording work, most of the actual digging was done by qufti, trained Egyptian archaeologists.

This is required by law in order to guarantee jobs for the local population, Bryan said.

"If you wanted to dig, no one would stop you," Bryan said, "but you still have to hire the workers."

Bryan mentioned the often constant, "very real" tension between the needs of the local people and the work being done on their land.

"We're right on the banks of the fertile land of the Nile, and this country has a lot of people which it needs to feed," she said. "Almost everywhere, archaeology is threatened by the encroachment of agriculture."

The land on which the Mut Temple Precinct is located belongs to the Egyptian Antiquities Service, and they supervise the digging.

Behind the temple dedicated to Mut is a kidney-shaped lake and a large open area that most likely contained domestic dwellings, granaries, bakeries and workshops to support the temple.

The combination of religious and domestic structures offers "great potential for exploration" and prompted Bryan to choose to work on the site.

The variety of structures also gives graduate students with diverse interests the opportunity to pursue primary research in the same place.

Currently, there are two dissertations in progress. One graduate student, Elaine Sullivan, is working on discovering the purpose of a large building behind the lake, while Elizabeth Waraksa is writing about the nude female figurines found inside the temple.

Waraksa said it is frustrating to discover interesting things on the last day of the dig.

"It seems like just as I am finding walls and artifacts in my trench that help me to understand the use of the space in antiquity, or just when a spectacular discovery is made, it's time to go home," she said.

"But that is both the thrill and the frustration of archaeology. You never know what you are going to find."

For Bryan, the daily surprises of archaeology are what attract her to come back annually. She said that she will probably finish her career working at this site.