ARCE New-England: Decoding Menkaure’s Valley Temple Excavation to Interpretation

Lecture Information

Menkaure’s Valley Temple (MVT) and its occupation is a major component in the overall settlement archaeology of the Giza Plateau. When George Reisner first excavated the MVT between 1908 and 1910 on behalf of Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, he uncovered a concentrated and complex sequence of occupation within the walls of the temple spanning 300 years. Advancing excavation techniques of the time, Reisner attempted to understand the building phases of the temple and occupation from the time when the first foundation limestone blocks were laid down by Menkaure’s builders, to the abandonment of the temple at the end of the 6th Dynasty. Reisner presented his findings and thoughts in his 1931 publication on Menkaure’s pyramid complex.

Along with the publication, we have his extensive archive of diaries and photographs, which can be viewed on Harvard University’s Digital Giza website. Perhaps one of the unique aspects of Reisner’s work was that he preserved the MVT for future generations by backfilling, a practice rarely carried out at that time. Reisner thought backfilling would allow future archaeologists, “in a hundred years,” to test the accuracy of his work, or settle new questions. In 2008, and one hundred years after Reisner’s first season at the MVT, teams from Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) began re-excavating and documenting the MVT. Since then, AERA has carried out eight seasons of work at the MVT using the best standard practice of archaeological excavation and recording, known as single context recording, derived from the Museum of London Archaeology (MoLA), developed in the 1970s and 1980s to deal with complex urban archaeology in London. Using the MoLA method at the MVT, AERA builds on Reisner’s work to advance knowledge of how Old Kingdom Egyptians occupied, built, and rebuilt this temple over a span of 300 hundred years.

Speaker Bio

Daniel Jones is a field archaeologist who has been working with Ancient Egypt Research Associates since 2008. He has also worked in Luxor, Memphis, the Delta, Fayum, Historic Cairo, and the Dakhla Oasis. Outside Egypt he has worked on sites in Italy, Spain, and the UK.