Background

Anna Stevens
The Stone Village is located in a shallow valley on the eastern face of a low plateau in the desert to the east of the main city. On the western face, some 20-minutes walk away, lies the Workmen’s (or Eastern) Village, the subject of EES excavations in the 1920s and again in the 1970s and ‘80s.

View from Stone Village to the cliffs of the high desert in the east. The entrances of the Royal and Great Wadis are highly visible from the site.

The Stone Village presents as a concentration of limestone boulders, some in approximately linear arrangements, covering an area of approximately 67 x 80 metres. Surrounding this core site is a variety of peripheral features: denuded stone structures, sherd scatters, and areas of surface pitting. Several ancient roadways run across the surrounding desert floor and plateau, some clearly circling the site.

View of the Stone Village from the south-east

A typical sample of surface remains, here along the southern margin of the core site: stone scatters, some vaguely linear, interspersed with areas of clean sand and gravely patches. Facing east.

One of the denuded stone structures (an altar foundation?) that surrounds the core site; this one is located on the top of the plateau immediately to the north-west.

View from the south-east, showing in the foreground the slightly mounded middens along the eastern edge of the core site.

Topographical map of the plateau showing the relative positions of the Stone and Workmen’s Villages, and the ancient roadways that surround them. Note the lack of a roadway connecting the sites directly. Map produced by Helen Fenwick (University of Hull), as part of the Desert Hinterland Survey.
                                                          

It is a little understood – and indeed, little commented upon – element of Amarna. Barry Kemp undertook a sketch survey of the site on behalf of the EES in the 1970s (see Kemp 1978) and was, in fact, the first archaeologist to recognise it as an area of ancient remains. More recently it has been the subject of magnetometer survey and aerial photography. The material culture is consistent with that encountered elsewhere at Amarna, and there is no reason at present to date it beyond the late Eighteenth/early Nineteenth Dynasty. Suggestions regarding its function remain speculative and based largely on its setting: on the city fringes, and tied in to the network of roadways. Was it a military outpost? A camp for workmen involved in cutting and decorating tombs? Might it have been an earlier ‘Workmen’s Village’ – or a settlement for servants assigned to the latter?

Against this backdrop, the Stone Village Project was initiated in 2005, as a subsidiary element of the broader EES Amarna Expedition. The aims of the project are multi-tiered. It seeks to:

• reconstruct as far as possible the layout and appearance of the Stone Village in antiquity and arrive at a better understanding of its internal function,
• position it within the broader physical and social landscape of Amarna (and beyond), through a contextual reading of the in situ remains, and the integration of its material culture, environmental and faunal remains into the site-wide data set.
• consider, more generally, what the site indicates of life in special-purpose and peripheral occupational areas, and in particular of themes of isolation, adaptation and the control and ordering of space and activity.

Four field seasons are planned, along with one final study season.

Publications

Stevens, A. 2011. ‘The Amarna Stone Village survey and life on the urban periphery in New Kingdom Egypt’, Journal of Field Archaeology 36, 100-118.

Stevens, A. and W. Dolling, 2009. ‘The Stone Village’, in B. Kemp, ‘Tell el-Amarna, 2008-9’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 95, 1-11

Stevens, A. and W. Dolling, 2008. ‘The Stone Village’, in B. Kemp, ‘Tell el-Amarna, 2007-8’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 94, 1-13

Stevens, A. and W. Dolling, 2007. ‘The Stone Village’, in B. J. Kemp, ‘Tell el-Amarna’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 93, 1–11.

Stevens, A. and W. Dolling, 2007. ‘Shedding light on the Stone Village at Amarna’, Egyptian Archaeology 31, 6–8.

Stevens, A. and W. Dolling, 2006. ‘The Stone Village: 2005–2006’, in B. J. Kemp, ‘Tell el-Amarna 2006’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 92, 23–7.