For 200 years Egyptologists had studied the most important people of the time of the pyramids: the kings and their officials. They found their statues, their inscriptions and their large tombs upon the plateau. But nobody has really answered the question, or even asked it: where are the all workers who built the pyramids?
So, in 1988-89 we did the first excavation in the area about 400 meters south of the Sphinx, to see, in fact, if that is where the workers lived as this is where some infrastructure was for building the pyramids.
The site is only excavated very recently, because people weren't interested in a settlement. People were interested in tombs, statues, gold bowls, mummies and inscriptions. Egyptology really started largely as philology.
But we do a different kind of archeology. We actually save and analyze every scrap of the ancient animal bone. When they butchered and consumed goat, sheep, cattle, fish and birds, they left the bones about in their garbage. And so we're doing something more like anthropology. We collect this evidence and we want to understand their diet, how they lived, what the climate was like, how they produced the food and how they gathered all this energy in one place to build the pyramids.
We know that these people were fed an enormous quantity of meat. In fact, we think that, using the samples from the ancient bone material from their garbage, people lived here 4500 years ago. We think that there was enough meat consumed here to feed 6-7 thousand people, if they ate meat everyday. And a lot of this meat was cattle. And when we can age and sex the cattle, it tends to be under 18 months, under 2 years old, and mostly male. The people were eating here extraordinary well, prime beef. And, of course, the beef is the most expensive, you know, and the most prestigious of all the meat consumed. The evidence that we have of their diet indicates that they ate very well, so it tends to argue against the idea that these were slaves building the pyramids. In fact, the whole idea of slavery, even the question of it, for the modern audience is completely confused. And this is understood.
So, our work is a little bit like a police detective's work in a crime scene. If a police detective goes into a crime scene, ideally she or he won't move any evidence. They photograph it, they do the drawings of it, they collect the fingerprints and the samples of blood, if there's blood in this crime scene. That's what we do except that it's not the crime scene, it's a scene where thousands of people lived. But we collect every piece of evidence, we do drawings, we do photographs and we try to reconstruct their life, because it's far away interesting for us than, say, another tomb with another series of texts. In fact, we almost are unhappy, when we find nice things. This excavation is not about finding nice things, it's about finding information about how people lived and how they were organized.
Most of this settlement is buried underneath the modern city and we can't get it anymore. But what we have here, in this area of low desert, is the last remaining open place, where we can do these large broad excavations. And it still continues.
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