Amara West

Photographs by Agata Deptuła. Room U192 at Old Dongola, showing burnt seeds preserved in their excavated contexts. Complete image reproduced unchanged from figure 4, Nasreldein and colleagues (2025). CC BY 4.0. The cover shows Old Dongola, not Amara West. At Amara West, a house became two homes. Archaeologists could follow the earlier building beneath the later arrangement: house E13.3 had been divided into E13.3-N and E13.3-S. The change required new front doors and a staircase, giving the smaller dwellings their own access to the street and roof. Someone had done more than put up a partition. They had changed how people could enter, move through and use the place. Neal Spencer’s excavation account ...

Photographs by Lorenzo de Lellis. Grinding equipment at Old Dongola, reproduced unchanged from figure 7, Nasreldein and colleagues. CC BY 4.0. The most revealing object in an archaeological display is not always the most beautiful one. A grinding stone can ask a question that a royal monument cannot answer: what work did an ordinary morning require? A storage jar can bring a household into view. A floor, seemingly empty, may still preserve traces of what happened above it. ...