Human remains from Saqqara West, Egypt, 2023–2025

The Saqqara necropolis, located some 30km south-west of Cairo, Egypt, on the desert plateau adjacent to the modern village of Saqqara, is the largest in the north-south running chain of cemeteries, collectively known as the Memphite necropolis (Figure 1).Saqqara West (29.871352N, 31.214597E), the area immediately west of the funerary complex of Pharaoh Netjerykhet (Djoser, c. 2649-2611 BCE) with the Step Pyramid as its focal monument, has been excavated by the Polish-Egyptian archaeological team since 1987.The necropolis is characterised by two temporally distant phases of funerary activities with distinctive burial practices and assemblages reflective of each individual's social standing.The so-called Lower Necropolis, dated to the late 5th and 6th Dynasties through to the early First Intermediate Period (c.2498-2055 BCE), was a designated burial place for the social lite and administrative officials of the Old Kingdom capital city of Memphis (Kuraszkiewicz 2013;Myliwiec et al. 2004Myliwiec et al. , 2010)).They were buried in the so-called mastaba tombs that comprised the superstructure with a funerary chapel and the underground rock-hewn burial chamber accessible through a vertical shaft.The body was wrapped in linen and placed in a wooden or reed coffin (Figure 2), with some individuals placed in stone-made sarcophagi.In contrast, the later Upper Necropolis of the Graeco-Roman Period (332 BCE -394 CE) comprised simple and predominantly uncoffined inhumations in shallow grave pits made in the top colluvial and sand deposits that accumulated over the limestone bedrock (Radomska et al. 2008; Figure 3).To date, a total of 768 human inhumations have been excavated, with approximately 75% of the assemblage represented by the later period burials.Due to the hot and dry climatic and environmental conditions of the region, coupled with elaborate funerary traditions, the overall preservation and condition of the human remains at Saqqara West was exceptional (Figures 2 and3), bar the individuals treated with molten resin as part of the mummification process.The latter practice, recorded in some of the later period inhumations, significantly affected both the preservation and condition of the skeletal remains (Figure 4).However, the majority of the inhumations at Saqqara West showed no evidence of such treatment and were found largely or

Chapel · Coffin · Colluvium · Excavation · Memphis · Statue · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology