The North Cliffs Cemetery at Amarna Excavations at the cemeteries of Amarna are providing new perspectives on non-elite lives and burial practices, and on urban environments in ancient Egypt. Anna Stevens, Gretchen Dabbs, Amandine Mérat and Anna Garnett present recent work at the Amarna North Cliffs Cemetery to demonstrate how collaborate approaches are helping to extract social data from these simple pit-grave cemeteries. The cemeteries of Amarna The unexpected discovery in the early 2000s of four non-elite cemeteries at Amarna spurred a long-term collaborative research campaign that has now recorded over 800 interments across these four burial grounds. Outwardly, the cemeteries are very similar. Most of the deceased were wrapped in textile and matting, and buried in a simple pit grave; there is not a lot of variation from grave to grave. Yet each burial ground also has its own character, and one of the aims of the research is to tease out the differences between the cemeteries, and what these indicate of how Akhetaten
A view across the North Cliffs Cemetery from the approach up to the rock-cut North Tombs.
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functioned as a city, and was experienced by its ancient population. The North Cliffs Cemetery From 2005–17, fieldwork targeted two large burial grounds located in wadis beside the officials’ tombs: the South and North Tombs Cemeter ies . These may have ser ved, respectively, as the primary burial ground for the Main City, and for one or more labourers’ communities. Each contains several thousand burials. In 2018, excavations shifted to a smaller burial ground, the North Cliffs Cemetery, located on the low desert below the tomb of
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