More re El Hibeh tell

The El Hibeh tell — a mound of ancient human architecture, artifacts and debris — is so rich with the remnants of human life in central Egypt that shards of pottery literally crunch under a visitor’s feet. Beads, jug handles, and even bits of fabric are visible to the naked eye, making collection and cataloging both an exciting and daunting task.

Carol Redmount, a professor of Egyptian archeology and chair of Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley, has led a research team to El Hibeh every year since 2001. The team varies from year to year but generally includes Hearst Museum Registrar Joan Knudsen, archeologists, Egyptologists, osteologists (bone specialists), ceramologists, Egyptian inspectors, and other experts. They head over there in the summer — when school is out, but also when the weather is punishingly hot.

Last year they made a special fall expedition. Funding for the expensive trip was covered by GRB Entertainment for the Discovery Channel. In February the excavation on the banks of the Nile was featured in an episode of The Bone Detectives, a series that runs until April, visiting archeological digs from Central America to the outer edge of the Arctic Circle.

The episode “Violence Along the Nile” focused on a mummy Redmount and her team found in an ancient cemetery at El Hibeh. While the site as a whole appears to have been inhabited from eleventh century BCE up to about the 6th century CE, the mummy that stars in the program is relatively young — probably from the Coptic period of the 5th to 6th centuries CE. True to the Christian tradition of that era, this mummy was not encased in cartonnage (like paper mache) or placed within a coffin, nor was it buried with the “grave goods” we associate with Egyptian graves — beads, jewelry, gold. But it did come out of a cemetery the team had just discovered.