Dr. Mark Lehner, archaeologist and director of the Giza Plateau and Mapping Project, met with Milton Academy fourth graders and ninth graders in December to discuss his work on the worker’s settlement around these Egyptian pyramids.
Mark and his team, are uncovering what appears to be the “missing city” — the home of the 20,000-30,000 workers who built the pyramids nearly 4,500 years ago. Mark’s team has focused on the excavation of bakeries that presumably fed the army of workers building the pyramids. “The spaces and artifacts are the hardware of some kind of social computer,” explains Mark. “What we are looking for is the software — housing and how people were fed , which will then lead to information about their beliefs, ideals and social relations.
Mark is a pioneer in the use of state-of-the-art computer graphics and remote sensing technology to model the ancient configuration of the Giza Plateau. He is a research associate at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago at Harvard Semitic Museum.
