Monday, February 19, 2007

Sa el Hagar (Sais) website updated

The Sais website has been updated with an excavation report from 2005, and an excavation and post-excavation report for 2006. There are some gorgeous photographs of lithics which have a lot in common with those from the Neolithic levels of the Faiyum and Merimde:
"Sais seems to have provided a focal point of settlement for people into the Buto-Maadi Period, when more substantial mud structures were built at the site. The animal bone record also shows the predominance of pigs as the meat of choice for Prehistoric period people. The animals must have been relatively easy to rear in the marshy conditions implied by the floral record which also contained evidence for einkorn wheat, and flax as well as barley and emmer-wheat. The comparative material from Merimde Beni Salame and the Fayum should provide a broader dataset for understanding the Neolithic transitions by placing this, the only Neolithic site in Egypt excavated on the flood plain into the broader context of the arrival of domestication into Egypt from the Near East and the network of contacts and sites such as those in the Fayum and at Merimde Beni Salame. The material at Sais demonstrates the potential for developing the data-set of Neolithic evidence into a larger statistical and settlement based study."
See the above page for full details.

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