Fourth Field Season (Spring 2012)

During the 2012 field season the documentation of the rich graffiti corpus of the Great Enclosure of Musawwarat es Sufra focussed on Complex 300. Fieldwork included digital photographic recording of graffiti and their block support in this part of the building complex, mainly documenting walls in courtyards 304 to 307 and columns in courtyard 304. The 'standard' photographic record was supplemented with series of photographs of Temple 300 and Complex 300 more generally, which are to support the presentation of spatial aspects of the graffiti corpus via the Musawwarat Graffiti Archive. Additionally, Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) data of especially interesting graffiti were created in Complex 500 and processed in camp, supplementing the ‘virtual preservation’ RTI project that was successfully run during the previous, third field season in 2011. Moreover, the descriptive documentation of graffiti in Complex 300 was continued. Due to the extreme heat at this time of the year, a larger portion of time than usual was spent entering data into the project (FileMaker) database in the camp, with on-site documention and collation work restricted to early mornings and late afternoons.

Participants: Cornelia Kleinitz, Franziska Lehmann & Mohamed el-Tayeb; RTI-Team: Cornelia Kleinitz, Zaroog Bakri & Hassan Ibidallah

Dates: April 2012

Duration: 3 weeks

Funding: The British Institute in Eastern Africa

Cooperation: Archaeological Computing Research Group of the University of Southampton

Text: Cornelia Kleinitz (2014)