In 1988, Mark Lehner and AERA discovered a site 400 meters south of the Sphinx that proved to be a vast settlement that once served as the base of operations for constructing the great pyramid complexes.

Its large population of laborers, craftsmen, and administrators worked toward the single goal of erecting the pharaoh’s eternal home. Our excavations here have provided a wealth of information about both the building of the pyramids at Giza and the development of the Egyptian state.

In the Menkaure Valley Temple (MVT), ancient priests carried out rituals to maintain the pharaoh Menkaure in the Afterlife. The temple was first excavated by George Reisner in 1908, but AERA’s recent work here has yielded many new discoveries and tantalizing clues of what may still remain to be uncovered.

Just to the north of the MVT stands the Khentkawes Town. This was home to the priests and administrators serving the cult of Queen Khentkawes I, who was buried in a monumental tomb at the west end of the town. Our work here has uncovered an eastern extension to the town, including a Nile port.

Mark Lehner and David Goodman launched the Giza Plateau Mapping Project in 1984 to create a high precision surveyed map of both the natural and cultural features of the entire Giza Plateau. We continue to use and build upon this data to this day.

In addition to survey, we now use ground penetrating radar, laser scanning, and drones to document the major monuments on the Giza plateau and other sites around Egypt.

Before James Allen and Mark Lehner began work here in 1979, there were no scale drawings of the Sphinx. The project that they embarked on produced an invaluable archive of Sphinx material that is now freely available to the public online.

In 2018, Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass returned to the Sphinx using traditional mapping, survey, and ground penetrating radar to document changes to the Sphinx and its environment since the original project. AERA team member Yukinori Kawae also caried out 3D recordings by drone, photogrammetry, and laser scanning to create a complete 3D image of the Sphinx.

Sir Flinders Petrie called this series of long stone-walled galleries just west of the Khafre pyramid “worker’s barracks” when he was exploring the Giza plateau in the 19th century. AERA began working in this area in 1988 to test his theory.

Luxor was the capital of Egypt during much of the Middle and New Kingdoms and a major religious center in ancient Egypt.

We spent two field seasons in Luxor running Salvage Archaeology Field Schools at two ancient sites that were soon to undergo major development: the Avenue of the Sphinxes (between the Luxor and Karnak Temples) and the Old Luxor town mound.

We thought we knew what we were going to find when we began excavating a new part of the Standing Wall Island building in The Lost City of the Pyramids, but instead we found something unexpected that has made us start to rethink how this massive building was used.

While conserving the remnants of Khufu’s once grand pyramid temple, we uncovered fragments of the temple’s inner walls. These newly discovered fragments were decorated with relief-carved and painted scenes of the king’s 30-year jubilee.

Recent articles and videos about AERA’s work include Journeys of the Pyramid Builders, the cover story of the July/August 2022 issue of Archaeology magazine, and A Refreshing Look at Egypt’s Ancient Pyramids, a New York Times article.

We feel that the best way to train students is through a hands-on approach to our current research topics.

Here two of our archaeozoology students share their first-hand experiences studying ancient animal bones.