Ochre quarries in the Great Sand Sea

Sahara

This article may have been published some time ago, but I've only just stumbled across it whilst trying to find out when the next issue of the journal Sahara is due.

Giancarlo Negro, Vincenzo de Michele and Benito Piacenza. Further remarks on the ochre quarries in the Western Desert, Egypt. A complement to our paper The Lost Ochre Quarries of king Cheops and Djedefre in the Great Sand Sea (Western Desert of Egypt) published in Sahara volume 16, 2005, p. 121-127, Pl. G-P, and to Dr Carlo Bergmann's remarks (Carlo Bergmann).

Introduction
Among the evidence for ancient industrial activities, the remains of quarries for soft rock materials are the most difficult to identify. When the quarried materials are hard, such as building stones, ornamental stones or marbles, the marks left by chisels, wedges, sawblades and picks provide a certain evidence. Where the materials concerned are soft or friable, such as brick or pottery clays, bleaching and degreasing earths, pozzuolans, colour earths and siliceous sands, in the temperate zone the quarrying marks disappear more or less rapidly because of erosion, and the working faces tend to slide down, fill up with water and debris and level out with the surrounding surface. As a consequence, it can be difficult to distinguish a natural outcrop from a working face, especially if the mining methods are not known and one has no familiarity with ancient and present-day quarry workings.

In the case of Cheops' and Djedefre's ochre quarries, the identification of the various working faces is easier, considering their excellent preservation due to three elements, namely: 1) a dry climate, though windy and with a high range of temperature, 2) a short working period, for obvious logistic problems, and 3) lack of later quarrying activity, that would have compromised the interpretation of the ancient stages.

See the above page for the full story - fascinating stuff.