Congratulations to Our 2026 Graduates

Thanks to your support, AERA’s 2026 Archaeological Field School at the Lost City of the Pyramids was a great success!

The 24 new graduates are all archaeologists serving as Inspectors for Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities (MoTA). They join over 350 previous AERA field school graduates who are now working at major heritage sites across Egypt.

During an intensive six-week excavation and training season, students worked with professional archaeologists to learn the principles and practice of stratigraphic excavation and received hands-on training in settlement archaeology, a specialty that demands the most refined excavation, recording, and material culture analysis. It is archaeology at its most granular—reconstructing daily life from dense, complex, and deeply stratified sites.

Our mission is to strengthen professional capacity and equip Egyptian archaeologists with the tools needed to manage and study their own heritage and to lead future excavation projects.

This year’s great success helps make future field schools possible!

Building on the success of the 2026 program, AERA intends to continue the Advanced Field School as an annual component of its research. Our goal is to provide sustained opportunities for MoTA inspectors and university students to gain advanced field and laboratory experience while contributing directly to the ongoing investigation of the Heit el-Ghurab site.

Over the longer term, AERA hopes to work with the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities to develop the Heit el-Ghurab site as an archaeological research and training preserve. Such a designation would help protect the settlement remains while supporting continued excavation, conservation, documentation, and field training at the site.

Your donation can help us make this new series of large-scale excavations and field schools at the Giza plateau possible. Tax-deductible donations can be made online here.

AERA’s 2026 Archaeological Field School Program

The field school students excavated craft production areas located along the Lost City’s southern harbor. By embedding training within active fieldwork, participants gain practical experience in excavation methods, stratigraphic recording, and interpretation while contributing to the ongoing investigation of the site.

The field school curriculum was modular by design. Students chose one area of concentration—Advanced Excavation, Material Culture, Environmental Science, Ceramics, or Osteology (the study of human remains). They also received additional training in advanced documentation including photography, photogrammetry, archaeological illustration, and survey. These intensive modules ensure that AERA students are trained in both traditional and cutting-edge documentation methods, giving students another essential tool in the archaeologist’s toolkit.

In addition to the students from the MoTA, the 2026 field school team included five senior Egyptian archaeologists serving as supervisors; an international team of professional archaeologist-teachers; four drivers; 60 site workers; six guards; one chef; and three assistant cooks—120 people in all, forming AERA’s team for the 2026 excavation season and field school.

Our international team of instructors reflected our close collaboration with archaeologists from Aarhus University and the Organization of Danish Museums, as well as with the Czech Institute of Egyptology at Charles University in Prague. Additionally, as part of AERA’s collaboration with Ain Shams University, five students joined the 2026 Advanced Field School for a week to introduce them to interdisciplinary archaeology on a major settlement site and a hands-on understanding of archaeological data recovery and documentation. We hope their visit will help catalyze a new round of Beginners’ Field Schools for university-level archaeologists in Egypt.

The 2026 Field School Teams

Team 1: Advanced Excavation

This season we returned to excavation at the massive Heit el-Ghurab site—Arabic for “Wall of the Crow.” The name comes from the site’s most visible feature: a 200-meter-long, 10-meter-high stone wall that bounds the city on the northwest. It’s fair to call this the Lost City of the Pyramids. Until AERA began uncovering it in 1988, no one knew it was here. Today, we have mapped roughly 25 acres, about the size of 14 soccer fields. Excavations as this massive city give us a window into how the pyramid builders lived, worked, and were provisioned.

This year our advanced excavation teams dug in two promising areas: Enclosure 1  and the Stoney Building. Both lie near the heart of the settlement and may have served as production or storage facilities during the reign of Menkaure. Enclosure 1 has already yielded evidence of alabaster working—tools, waste, and possible workspaces—while the adjacent Stoney Building remains enigmatic. Its thick walls and unusual layout suggest an important function, possibly linked to administration or provisioning. This season’s work helped clarify its role in the life of the Lost City.

Teams 2 & 3: Material Culture and Environmental Science
These two teams worked closely in AERA’s field lab to recover, sort, and analyze materials using methods honed over two decades of excavation. These specialists-in-training focused on the fine-grained traces of daily life—fragments of pottery, bone, seed, sealings, plaster, and ash that together tell the story of a living city.

Students learned from the macro to the micro—from whole pots, animal bones, flint knives, and beautifully preserved sealings, to the smallest fragments recovered by wet sieving and seen under a microscope. If we don’t recover and record the fine-grained evidence during excavation, we lose it forever—along with the stories it tells about how people lived, how they provisioned themselves, and how they organized labor to build the pyramids. Sickle blades show that people farmed. Chipped flint projectile points show they hunted. Copper fishhooks show they fished. Fragments of painted, polychrome plaster show that high-status individuals once lived and worked here.

Team 4: Ceramics
AERA’s Field School offers an ideal setting for hands-on training in ceramic analysis—both in the field and in the lab. Over more than two decades, pottery from the Heit el-Ghurab site has been carefully studied, resulting in a robust typology of vessel forms, a classification of clay fabrics, and a database now spanning 25 years. AERA team member Anna Wodzińska literally wrote the book on identifying ancient Egyptian pottery.

Trainees in the ceramic module learned to identify vessel types and study the main clay fabrics used in ancient Egyptian pottery. They explored the stages of manufacture, from shaping and surface treatment to firing techniques and decorative styles. These observations help students link pottery to patterns of use, allowing them to identify the functions of buildings and rooms across the site—and even to infer aspects of economic and social status. The curriculum expands beyond the local context. Students examine characteristic pottery types across different Egyptian periods, gaining tools not only for dating but also for tracing the long development of ceramics as a cultural product—one inseparable from other expressions of ancient Egyptian life.

Team 5: Osteology
One of the great successes of AERA’s original field school program was osteoarchaeology—the excavation, documentation, and analysis of human remains. Heit el-Ghurab offers an exceptional setting for this training. Some 2,000 years after the settlement’s heyday, during the Late Period (c. 664–525 BC), a local population reused the site as a cemetery, cutting hundreds of graves into the compact surface of the 4th Dynasty ruins.

This year our osteologists-in-training excavated in the far north of the site, near the base of the Wall of the Crow. Here lie dozens of burials from the Late Period, dating to the era of the Old Testament prophets. These burials cluster with increasing density toward the east end of the Wall of the Crow, as though this monumental structure had taken on a sacred significance. In some areas, we found as many as five intercutting burials per square meter. This year our students excavated, documented, and studied twenty-two burials and one votive deposit containing the remains of at least ten dog burials—piecing together lives once lived in the shadow of the pyramids.

Help Us Continue This Important Work

Your donations help us make this new series of large-scale excavations and field schools at the Giza plateau possible!

Your tax-deductible donation can be made online here.

To donate by check, please make it payable to AERA and mail it to: AERA, 26 Lincoln Street, Suite 5, Boston MA 02135 USA. 

For those interested in making a gift through an electronic transfer of stock, potentially saving on capital gains tax, please contact us at support@aeraweb.org for further details. 

Founded in 1985, AERA is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, nonprofit research organization. If you have any questions about your donation, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at support@aeraweb.org and we would be happy to assist you. 

The Heit el-Ghurab Archaeology Preserve

Our long-term goal is to establish the Heit el-Ghurab Archaeology Preserve as a permanent research and training ground for Egyptian archaeologists. 

The archaeology of settlement sites like Heit el-Ghurab is challenging. Learning on a complex ancient settlement site provides our field school students with skills they can apply to tombs, temples, and any other kind of excavation site in Egypt.

Learn more about the Heit el-Ghurab site and the nearly 40-year history of our excavations.