Field Diary 2020.5 © Abydos Archaeology
One of the benefits of quarantine at Abydos has been long hikes in the desert. In the two-plus months since the end of the 2020 excavations and beginning of the global lockdown against Covid-19, we have explored the desert canyons surrounding the site as often as possible. We are three Americans (the authors and their son) from the North Abydos Expedition team remaining in the Abydos field house after the rest of the North American team left, as planned, in early March. Since then—and after finding ourselves locked down by airport closures in late March—we have been working in isolation at the field house along with five Egyptian members of the team (two archaeologists and three in Expedition operations), while waiting for international travel to resume.
A hike in the “Great Wadi” at Abydos, March 29, 2020, photo by Wendy Doyon.
North Abydos Expedition field house, May 9, 2020, photo by Wendy Doyon.
Retrieving the Flinders Petrie and Gertrude Caton-Thompson finds excavated in 2004-05 from the on-site collections, March 17, 2020, photo by Wendy Doyon.
After closing the on-site excavations in March, a number of projects have kept us busy, including writing this season's field report, registering the excavated material, designing and installing new interpretive signage for visitors to North Abydos, editing our video series, and sharing our work and dig life on social media. But the most interesting, and most enjoyable aspect of our desert quarantine has been the rare and very welcome opportunity to do focused research on the history of archaeology at Abydos in situ.
A letter from Hilda to Flinders Petrie written Nov. 1921, recovered at Abydos Nov. 2004, photo by Ayman Damarany for North Abydos Expedition, 2020.
We started by retrieving a small box from our on-site collections labeled “Petrie related finds 2004-5.” Inside the box were some of the materials from Flinders and Hilda Petrie’s last field house at Abydos, dating to the 1921-22 season in which they, along with prehistoric archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson and others, camped inside the Shunet el-Zebib.
In our 2004-05 excavations, the team happened upon the remains of Petrie’s camp buried inside the west wall of the Shuneh, which included among other things, letters, scraps of various documents, packaging, newspapers, and other artifacts of daily life in the field one hundred years ago. Like any other excavated material at north Abydos, these historical finds were systematically recorded, cataloged, and housed for future study. We are now preparing the results of those excavations for publication, and of particular interest to our research are Caton-Thompson’s Paleolithic findings from her walking survey of the high desert during the 1921-22 season.
Gertrude Caton-Thompson driving an expedition car at Qasr al-Sagha in the Fayum, c. late 1920s or early 1930s. Photo courtesy of UCL Special Collections, Caton-Thompson Archive.
Which brings us back to those long hikes in the desert. (Hikes that were for personal recreation while in quarantine, not as part of the Expedition's fieldwork). Not only have these extra two months of quarantine at Abydos afforded the opportunity to re-examine the collection of Petrie material excavated in 2004-05, they have also given us the chance to follow in Caton-Thompson’s footsteps, exploring Abydos in deep time through its desolate desert canyons, and combining the excavation of historical sources with on-the-ground detective work to reconstruct her and her colleagues’ pioneering fieldwork a century ago.
Abydos is an archaeological site complex going back not only to the birth of Egyptian history—when Egypt’s first kings built their tombs and funerary monuments here around 5,000 years ago—but to a time so deeply buried in human memory it is almost impossible to reach. Early humans wandered this land tens, even hundreds of thousands of years ago, at least as far back as the end of the Lower Paleolithic c. 300,000 BP. Historic Abydos lies within a desert embayment that stretches more than five miles (about 9 km) between two cliff promontories at the northern and southern ends of an almost thousand-foot-high desert escarpment. It is one of the world’s best-preserved geological theaters against which the human drama has unfolded.
Looking east from the high desert above the sacred wadi of Umm al-Qa‘ab—ancient burial ground of Egypt’s first kings; the Shunet el-Zebib is just visible in the middle distance, with the cliffs of Nag‘ al-Deir faintly outlined on the distant horizon, May 24, 2020, photo by Wendy Doyon.
Father and son silhouetted against a great, wind-deposited sand dune damming the mouth of a side canyon near the end of the “Great Wadi” at Abydos, March 29, 2020, photo by Wendy Doyon.
Looking south toward the Nile Valley in the far distance from inside the mouth of one of the northern wadis at Abydos, April 11, 2020, photo by Wendy Doyon.
Looking up toward the vantage point in the photo at upper left; and looking west, in the opposite direction from the same vantage point on the high desert—a vista stretching hundreds of thousands of years into the human past, May 24, 2020, photos by Wendy Doyon.
A page from history on a visit to Abydos in 1933, photo by Wendy Doyon, courtesy of Pitt Rivers Museum Manuscript Collections, Gardner Papers.
Most of what archaeologists do happens down in the dirt, but sometimes you need a little elevation to see into the past. And to really appreciate the drama of the Abydos landscape, it helps to climb. From late March into April, we wandered among the cliffs of southern Abydos; ventured up into the sacred wadi that lies beyond the most ancient burial ground of Umm al-Qa‘ab; and planned excursions into the less accessible northern wadis—narrow desert canyons cut by eons of water drainage from the high desert, which shelter steep cliffs and dunes soaring up to 950 feet above the low desert terrace. And as April turned to May and the thermometer often reached up over 100˚F, we waited for one more cool day to make a long-anticipated trek up into the no-man’s-land on the far side of the northern promontory. There we set out like pilgrims in search of an ancestor’s tomb to try to find the exact spot where an archival photograph that surfaced in our research had been taken nearly a hundred years earlier.
Detail of a “tufa” limestone deposit from the Quaternary north of Abydos, May 6, 2020, photo by Wendy Doyon.
Since this season’s canyon explorations hadn’t yet brought us all the way up to the high desert plateau, where archaeological visibility stretches more than 300,000 years before the present, this hike was special. Because unlike the wadis, which are dynamic and ever-changing desert worlds, parts of the high desert surface are perfectly preserved canvases of prehistoric stone tool making, with flakes, cores, blades, scrapers, and other tools lying undisturbed right where the last fingers to hold them let go and wandered off eons ago. The extreme northern end of Abydos, beyond the promontory, also happens to preserve similarly breathtaking scenes from deep time, giving us our first glimpse of a truly prehistoric landscape. Here the ground is covered in “tufa” — spooky mineral deposits left behind by running water that once, millions of years ago, sparkled under the same sun beating down on their stony formations today. They look like something from the surface of Mars, or deep inside an ancient cave. Hidden in plain sight amongst the shelly rocks and gravel, pitted at irregular intervals by flat, sandy depressions and deep, inverted dunes; and scattered along the hilly mounds and jagged outcrops of the surrounding topography are thousands of prehistoric stone tools, thoughtfully crafted artifacts of a culture just as alien as the landscape they inhabit.
Walking south, with the promontory in front of us and historic Abydos now unreachable on the other side, we searched for the view to match our archival photo. We knew we were getting close, and then suddenly there it was spread out before us: an exact match, the proof that we had followed our predecessors’ footsteps correctly over the landscape, and that we could, if only for an instant, actually step back in time with them. In spite of the distance between us, and all that had changed, we stood where they stood and saw exactly what they saw. These are the moments we, as students of history, live for—when all seems right with the world.
The author steps back in time, May 6, 2020, photo by Matthew D. Adams.
Archaeological visibility on the high desert plateau at Abydos is unparalleled, May 24, 2020, photo by Wendy Doyon.
Abydos is an island in time, a place where the modern human time-scale as we know it long ago emerged from the river of cosmic time flowing around it. When we finally did make it up to the high desert a few weeks later on Eid al-Fitr, the end of an excruciatingly hot and thirsty Ramadan (not a drop of beer to be had!), the picture of Abydos’ place in time could not have been clearer or more beautiful.
But in spite of our isolation here in both space and time, we force ourselves to read the news every day. We follow social media, we Zoom with our preschooler’s classmates in lockdown in New Jersey, we FaceTime with his grandmothers, we check in with family and friends across the US and around the world. We know it is essential that we share this moment in history with our fellow humans, that we construct a social context for remembering it. And like so many others in so many ways, our bodies have already recorded the passage of this virus through human history. We are genetic driftwood on the 21st Century wave of plague that has already swept away too many souls.
Archaeology Cat, aka Killer & her newborn kitten Heb Sed, April 2, 2020, photo by Wendy Doyon.
Since our quarantine began in mid-March, we’ve also watched the most beloved of the ten or so Archaeology Cats who live at the Abydos field house raise a kitten from one of her yearly litters. Killer, as Mama Archaeology Cat has been called for more than a decade since she started populating the field house with generations of archaeology-cats-in-training (their most important job being to kill the mice that attract snakes), gave birth to a litter in late March, and by early April one of the babies was growing strong. Although most of the other cats in the house are also Killer’s kids, now grown up and having babies of their own, the majority of kittens born in the desert don’t survive long. So the arrival of a healthy baby from what may very well be the aging and frail Mama Archaeology Cat’s last litter gave us plenty of reason to celebrate. We named her Heb Sed.
Our four-year-old son’s experience has been heartwarming, too. When we left for the field in late January, he was a mere four-and-a-half. Now, he’s a big going-on-five. And as any parent knows there is a long road travelled from one end of four to the other, the age when things—mostly crises—start happening to us. There is a strangeness and a bittersweetness in observing our son’s first experience of a crisis shared by millions of other people in the real world.
Young explorer at Abydos, May 6, 2020, photo by Wendy Doyon.
On the one hand, he is almost entirely unaware of the changing world outside, sealed off in a childhood bubble more normal than anything he would be experiencing at home. Here, unlike his friends in NJ, he can run barefoot and play outside in the sun everyday—dirty, mischievous, and largely unsupervised. He can be near all of the people who have been in the house together for weeks. They can cut his hair, give him piggy-back rides, kiss and hug him, share the cookies they steal from the cupboards, make forts and clubhouses, fight in the dirt, and play Corona Zombie. His Arabic is getting better every day, he knows a lot more about skeletons and diagnostic pottery sherds than the average four-year-old, and he is immersed in the culture of Ramadan and the Egyptian way of life as if it is the most natural thing in the world. In a way, however fleeting, he has the kind of real, unstructured freedom of the 1970s & 80s we all pine for, and wish we could replicate for our anxious and psychologically traumatized kids today.
Fort Abydos, May 26, 2020, photo by Wendy Doyon.
On the other hand, because we are in a bubble and have not experienced the profound changes in the outside world since January, we are ill-prepared for our return to a United States more broken and unsafe than ever before. In spite of having recovered from its physical effects, there lingers a certain guilt at having been spared the worst of the virus’s social effects (so far), and a certain dread of turning that page in the book of our son’s life. At Abydos, perhaps as at no other place in the world, the continuity of the human experience recorded in the landscape is just as apparent as its thousands of years worth of change. Here, it seems just possible he could stay young forever.
Baboons in adoration of the sun inside the “Portal” Temple of Ramesses II at North Abydos, photo by Robert Fletcher for North Abydos Expedition, 2001.
One recent morning at breakfast he spun a tale for us about a monkey at Kom el-Sultan who jumped off the wall of the Ramesses II “Portal” Temple and came to life. (The “Portal” Temple is known locally as the “monkey temple” on account of the best-preserved section of relief inside what was once the temple’s main corridor). The monkey was chased by a dog, who was chased by an “alive banana,” who was chased by a giant pickle and some marshmallows all the way to the field house, where they all chased and played with Heb Sed.
Places like Abydos teach us that we are part of something bigger than a single human experience. No matter what nature throws at us, or how many worthless politicians will be there to kick us when we’re down, there’s comfort in the certainty that the next generation will find new ways to bring old monkeys to life.