The caches of the North Saqqara Sacred Animal Necropolis are the last major group of unpublished material from the 1964-1976 EES excavations, which were at first under the direction of W.B. Emery. Sanda Heinz and I are working on the bronzes and associated material to gain insight in their development over time. The process of caching has been the focus of our attention in 2017 with an article on this topic now under peer review.
This thesis analyses a range of lead objects discovered in Thonis-Heracleion, an Egyptian port city, and offers a new perspective on the use of metals in antiquity. It advances two central arguments: firstly, that the large quantity of lead artefacts in Thonis-Heracleion is not exceptional but rather a more accurate reflection of the metallisation of ancient societies and secondly, that the corpus of lead objects sheds light on aspects of ancient communities that normally remain invisible due to the ease of recycling and low cost of lead.