Luxury Goods Manufacture at Amarna, Gurob, and Malqata Compared

It should be borne in mind that the data from all archaeological excavations and surveys over the world, not only with the evidence from Amarna, Gurob, and Malqata, ought to be treated with a certain amount of caution. One problem that affects the data from all sites discussed here is that early excavations resulted in many objects being lost or being held unprovenanced in collections. The particular challenge with the archaeological evidence from Amarna is the fact that the site was very short-lived and that there was an abrupt move away from Amarna at the end of the Amarna Period. Many objects of high value would have been removed by their owners, or stolen by those using the opportunity. Certain areas of settlement, especially those to the extreme north and south of the site, were also more exposed than others, thus being more vulnerable to looters. In addition, conditions of preservation differ across the site, resulting in the better survival of objects in some areas than in others. While finds at Amarna, at least from the DOG excavations onwards, were fairly well catalogued according to their provenance, the origins of the objects excavated in the settlement areas of Gurob by Hughes-Hughes on behalf of Petrie are not possible to reconstruct. Hence, this data can only be generally compared to the results of the modern spatial analysis, and only tentatively be used to better understand the use of the site. In addition, the exposure of the site to much modern human activity, in particular during its period of use by the army, has resulted in much destruction and subsequent loss of data. The name of Malqata alone, in Arabic meaning ‘the place where things are found’, highlights the vulnerability of the site in the past and present and the fact that the corpus of material from this site is far from complete. Moreover, the insufficient level of documentation supplied by the 1888–1920 excavators (and the fact that the finds from these missions have still not been completely acquisitioned by museums) means that neither spatial nor statistical analyses are feasible for this site.