This archaeological report provides a comprehensive study of the
excavations carried out at Amheida House B2 in Egypt's Dakhleh Oasis
between 2005 and 2007, followed by three study seasons between 2008 and
2010.
The excavations at Amheida in Egypt's western desert, begun in 2001
under the aegis of Columbia University and sponsored by NYU since 2008,
are investigating all aspects of social life and material culture at the
administrative center of ancient Trimithis. The excavations so far have
focused on three areas of this very large site: a centrally located
upper-class fourth-century AD house with wall paintings, an adjoining
school, and underlying remains of a Roman bath complex; a more modest
house of the third century; and the temple hill, with remains of the
Temple of Thoth built in the first century AD and of earlier structures.
Architectural conservation has protected and partly restored two
standing funerary monuments, a mud-brick pyramid and a tower tomb, both
of the Roman period.
This volume presents and discusses the architecture, artifacts and
ecofacts recovered from B2 in a holistic manner, which has rarely before
been attempted in a full report on the excavation of a Romano-Egyptian
house. The primary aim of this volume is to combine an architectural and
material-based study with an explicitly contextual and theoretical
analysis. In so doing, it develops a methodology and presents a case
study of how the rich material remains of Romano-Egyptian houses may be
used to investigate the relationship between domestic remains and social
identity.
