Deir el-Ballas 2025, Week 1: 1/4 – 1/10

The Deir el-Ballas Expedition started up work at the site on January 4 with a large contingent of archaeology students from the American University in Cairo, UCLA, and Yale University. This season we are concentrating our efforts on three locations, the North Wadi Settlement, where there are a number of houses threatened by agricultural projects, continuing our work in the North Palace Settlement, excavating Houses E, F, and G, and continuing restoration work on the North Palace.

Already our excavation work in the North Wadi Settlement is revealing a dense concentration of exciting finds from domestic contexts. Archaeology students Matei Tichindelean, Karim El-Eita, Sara Ahmed Aziz, and Waleed Hawatky have opened several trenches throughout the neighborhood to better understand the layout of the area and the relationship between the structures. Hassan Elzawy is working in the North Palace Settlement to clear debris ahead of our investigation of the northern half of House G, which we discovered last season.

We were again joined by Claire Malleson, who is working on the botanical remains from the excavations. This week, our surveyor Piet Collet laid out new excavation squares in the North Wadi Settlement and is working on completing a new map of the entire site. Thanks to support from the American University in Cairo we were able to make mud bricks over last summer for the restoration work on the North Palace. These bricks, following the size of the ancient ones are huge – some of the largest ever found in Egypt, measuring a cubit (53 centimeters) in length. We have expert masons working on both reconstructing the southern enclosure wall, in order to help protect the palace, and capping the casemate cells that supported a raised second story in the palace.