Cairo Lecture: Tracing Change in Living Rock: Central Field Cemetery at Giza

Lecture Information

The “Central Field” is an Old Kingdom cemetery situated in a quarry south of the Khafre causeway. Within this unique landscape­, which supplied limestone to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu­, innovative construction techniques emerge in non-royal burials that include some of the earliest examples of rock-cut tombs in pharaonic Egypt.

Since Cairo University excavated the site in the 1930s, the Central Field has received little attention despite its importance for the Giza Necropolis. This lecture not only presents several exciting avenues for how the cemetery transformed over the 3^rd millennium BCE, but also addresses the living history of this site from the village that borders the Giza Plateau.

Speaker Bio

Julia Viani Puglisi is a PhD candidate in Egyptology in the Department of Near Eastern Languages in Civilizations at Harvard University. After receiving a BA in Classical Languages and an MA in Egyptology with a specialization in digital humanities, Puglisi currently investigates the history of the Giza necropolis with a particular emphasis on the Central Field cemetery in the Old Kingdom. Her interests include understanding the mechanisms of change, improving relative dating methods, and investigating the social history of the late third millennium.

As a member of the Giza Project at Harvard and a recipient of the ARCE-CAORC Fellowship, Puglisi now works on enriching the available documentation of the Central Field cemetery in Giza and Cairo. Her work not only focuses on understanding the distant past, but deeply considers the living history of archaeological sites and the value of local voices in the practice of history-writing.