Pots, Fish and Cobras at Sais: a load of old rubbish or a ritual?

Excavations at Sais over the last twenty years have focussed on the levels of the city from the Late Ramesside period, and a set of buildings that contain extensive storage and food processing facilities that was later overbuilt by a different type of construction. The new large wall seems to have surrounded small rooms with hearths, kilns and domestic spaces that went through several phases of development in the Third Intermediate Period. The creation of the new wall involved remodelling of the early structures using rubbish deposits as well as, what seems to be, an extensive pottery deposit of some kind. Using ERT and subsurface investigation the new large wall has been tracked further and is part of an extensive structure that may have defined the layout of Sais in the early TIP. The talk will look at the differences between the phases, the reasons for the change in the transitional period and whether the pottery deposit can be considered part of a ritual process or was for purely pragmatic reasons.

Penelope Wilson Bio:
I am an Egyptologist who graduated from Liverpool University with a PhD in Ptolemaic Lexicography. I worked as Assistant Curator in the Dept. of Antiquities, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge for 7 years, but have spent most of my working life in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University where I am now Associate Professor in Egyptian Archaeology. I have worked in Egypt at sites including Qasr Ibrim, Tell el Balamun and Zawiet Umm el Rakham and am currently the Field Director of the long running Royal Survey of Sais project, as well as Director of the Delta Survey Project, administered through the Egypt Exploration Society.