Will’s great panorama today (click here for a larger image) shows how dry the lake has become on this east side. The silt lake bed is visible nearly as far as the location of the pump in the background. Small rivulets of ground water that is coming up as the pumping goes on run through the silt. In our squares this ground water appears whenever the sump pump fails, and we have had to abandon all the trenches that are not on the lake’s edge – that is, D and F. C, which you can see with the baked brick feature, is also soaking well and becomes watery within a short time if the pump is not running. We are expecting Dr. Ed Bouwer from Hopkins Engineering to arrive on Thursday and look forward to his comments.

Today is Will and Keli’s last day on site. Will is drawing two faces of a four sided square pillar that was so badly damaged that its conservation took more than a year. Now it looks great, thanks for Lotfi and his team particularly. Keli and I look at a small statue fragment was found in Square A earlier in June. Oddly enough, we think that it may well be a piece of a statue that we found in the Second Court in 2002!

Without Hiroko we would not know where anything is. Blocks have been moved from find spots to mastabas for treatment and then moved again to display areas. Hiroko keeps an up to date record and map of the location of each block, as well as a treatment record in a database that we maintain in Filemaker.

Here’s a view today of the lake on the west side of the temple. There is a great deal more water over here, but the lake is still quite a large distance from the stone quay now.