Analysis of the finds made in a mummification workshop discovered in the Saqqara necropolis has shed new light on the ancient Egyptian business of death.

The mummification complex was discovered in near the 5th Dynasty Pyramid of Unas, between the pyramids of Sekhemket and Djoser. It is far newer than the Old Kingdom pyramid complexes, dating to the 26th Dynasty (ca. 664-525 B.C.). A central shaft 40 feet deep was discovered in 2018. Archaeologists had to remove 42 tons of sand and rock filling the shaft before reaching a large chamber with a high ceiling. It too was filled with sand and rocks, but scattered in the fill were thousands of pottery fragments.

Once the chamber was cleared of all debris, archaeologists realized it was not a tomb, but rather a workshop for the mummification of the dead. It had a large incense burner, drainage channels for blood and a natural ventilation system, key features for dealing with the effluvia and smells of dead bodies.

The room had a raised, table-like area and shallow channels cut into the bedrock along the base of one wall. In one corner, a barrel-sized bowl was filled with charcoal, ash, and dark sand. An older tunnel—part of a network of passages that honeycomb the rock beneath Saqqara—moved cool air through the space.

The pottery fragments have proven to be a treasury of information as well.

Over the past year, pottery experts were able to piece together the ceramic sherds, reconstructing hundreds of small bowls and jars, each one inscribed with a label.

“Every single cup or bowl has the name of the substance it held, and the days of the embalming procedure it was used,” [University of Tübingen Egyptologist Ramadan] Hussein says. “Instructions are written directly on the objects.”

These finds are hugely significant because while the Egyptians left behind a great deal of information on their burial practices in writing and in paintings on tomb walls, very few mummification workshops have been discovered. When Egyptologists began scouring the sands for ancient remains, they were only interested in big ticket finds — pharaonic treasure, ideally. Working spaces were of no interest and were either overlooked or destroyed in the attempt to get into more “valuable” tombs.

Adjacent to the mummification workshop, in 2018 archaeologists discovered a burial shaft 100 feet deep with five chambers branching off from the bottom. It too dates to the 26th Dynasty. Inside were the remains of more than 50 mummies and skeletonized individuals, five massive sarcophagi, alabaster canopic jars, thousands of shabti figurines and a gilded silver funerary mask that was the first of its kind found in 50 years. After more than a year of excavation, a sixth chamber has now been found hidden behind a stone wall.

The sixth chamber contained four wooden coffins, one of whom belonged to a woman named Didibastett. While her coffin (and the other three) was in poor condition, a very unusual, even unique, feature caught the team’s attention: she had six canopic jars used to contain her embalmed organs. Standard mummification custom was to embalm only the lungs, liver, stomach and intestine which were then stored in four separate jars under the protection of the four sons of Horus. CT scans of the jars found that the two supernumerary ones do contain human tissue, exactly what kind is not yet known. A radiologist is examining the scans to identify which of Didibastett’s organs were embalmed against customary practice.

Perhaps she had a special contract with the folks at the mummification workshop, as the people interred in the deep shaft tomb — from the wealthy in expensive limestone sarcophagi to middle class Egyptians in wooden coffins to labourers simply wrapped in linen — were buried and their spiritual maintenance tasks performed by the embalmers. The mummification process, burial of the body and ongoing ritual upkeep of the dead were all revenue streams for the embalmers who were paid in cash or land by the surviving families. They offered a variety of packages for any budget.

Ancient Egyptian society included an entire class of priests dedicated to caring for the spirits of the dead. Their job description included maintaining tombs and praying for their departed owners. Some owned dozens of tombs, with hundreds of mummies packed into each one.

“People had to bring weekly offerings to the dead to keep them alive,” says Koen Donker van Heel, an Egyptologist at the University of Leiden who has spent years studying the legal contracts priests signed with the families of the dead. “Dead people are money. That’s basically it.”

The excavation of the Saqqara workshop and its finds will be explored in Kingdom of the Mummies, a four-part series on National Geographic starting May 12th in the US and going global next month.

During a time of hardship, Native American peoples of the Southeast sought solace in oyster feasts, a new study has found. Analysis of archaeological remains on Roberts Island, a shell mound complex off the central west coast of Florida about 50 miles north of Tampa Bay, found that people gathered there for ceremonial purposes even when resources were severely curtailed by climate change.

Built and maintained by a small group of local residents, Roberts Island and Crystal River, its larger, more glamorous ceremonial site next door, drew people of different cultural groups who traveled long distances to celebrate there. As with other ancient Native American ceremonial sites (Poverty Point for example), the Roberts Island complex was a gathering place of immense social and cultural diversity. It was built after the decline of Crystal Island around 650 A.D., and remained in regular use until around 1050, one of the last of the ancient religious sites that had once flourished all along the Eastern seaboard.

It consists of three platform mounds arranged in a rough triangle forming a central plaza between them where people would gather to watch the ceremonies taking place atop the mounds. The mounds were originally pyramidal, built from midden materials that were deposited one basket at a time. The bases of the mounds covered thousands of square feet in area and the mounds could reach more than 30 feet in height, so they must have taken a huge number of basketsfull to build.

The locals who built and maintained Roberts Island hosted thousands of visitors who descended upon it for a month or two out of the year to participate in community feasts and religious celebrations, including burials and marriages.

Researchers collected samples from mounds and middens at the two ceremonial sites, identifying the species present and calculating the weight of the meat they would have contained. They found that feasts at Roberts Island featured far fewer species. Meat from oysters and other bivalves accounted for 75% of the weight of Robert Island samples and roughly 25% of the weight from Crystal River. Meat from deer and other mammals made up 45% of the weight in Crystal River samples and less than 3% from Roberts Island.

[Lead study author C. Trevor] Duke said evidence suggests that Roberts Island residents also had to travel farther to harvest food. As sea levels fell, oyster beds may have shifted seaward, possibly explaining why the Crystal River population relocated to the island, which was small and had few resources.

“Previous research suggests that environmental change completely rearranged the distribution of reefs and the ecosystem,” Duke said. “They had to go far out to harvest these things to keep their ritual program active.”

No one knows what caused the widespread abandonment of most of the region’s ceremonial sites in A.D. 650, Duke said. But the production of Weeden Island pottery, likely associated with religious activities, ramped up as bustling sites became ghost towns.

“That’s kind of counterintuitive,” he said. “This religious movement comes on really strong right as this abandonment is happening. It almost seems like people were trying to do something, create some kind of intervention to stop whatever was happening.”

Man, this makes me miss my local $1 oyster happy hour even more than I did before. The study has been published in the journal Southeastern Archaeology.

The remains of a Bronze Age chieftain interred with unprecedented animal offerings and a second man buried in a seated position have been unearthed in Lechlade-on-Thames, Gloucestershire, southwestern England. The burials were discovered in 2017 during an archaeological survey in advance of construction of a skate park. Radiocarbon analysis of the bones dates both men to around 2200 B.C.

The chieftain was identified as an important, wealthy leader by the unusually prolific animal remains found in his grave. The skulls and hooves from four different cattle were discovered. Head and hoof cattle burials have been found before — it was a Bronze Age funerary practice seen across Europe — but all of the ones unearthed in the UK before this were single cattle burials with one skull and one hoof from one animal.

Artifacts buried with the chieftain include a copper dagger with a whale bone pommel, a stone wrist guard, an amber bead and a strike-a-light kit composed of a flint and iron pyrite. These grave goods are characteristic of Beaker culture burials. The one thing he was not buried with was the actual Beaker pot after which the culture was named. Archaeologists think this noticeable absence indicates the deceased performed a specialized function in his community, one not connected with the symbolism of the Beaker pot.

The chieftain grave was found in the center of a circular ditch. The terrain is flat now, but at the time of the burial it was a barrow with soil mounded inside the ring ditch. This design is also typical of Beaker cultural burials. Within the circular enclosure next to the central grave were the remains of an older man. He was 50-60 years old when he died.

“He was buried in an unusual ‘seated’ position — his legs were present extending downwards towards the base of his grave pit,” [Foundations Archaeology archaeologist Andy] Hood said. “We haven’t found a direct parallel elsewhere in Bronze Age Britain.”

Most people buried in Bronze Age Britain were arranged in a crouched position on their sides, as the chieftain was. So the older man’s proximity to the chieftain, as well as the man’s lack of a Beaker “package” and strange burial position, may remain a mystery for the ages.