Royal Ontario Museum
Professor Emeritus Nicholas Millet was the Director of the Royal Ontario Museum Archaeological Mission at Illahun, where he worked with a team from the Canadian Institute in Egypt. The R.O.M. team began work on surveying the town of Kahun in the spring of 1991, and returned the following year to complete this initial survey, and began small-scale excavations at selected points. This work was continued in the 1993 season. The Teams objective was to establish the sites state of preservation, since Petrie excavated it some 100 years earlier.
In 1994 the team concentrated their efforts on excavating the highest area of the site that Petrie called the "Acropolis". Petrie excavated this large mansion, but the ground was too denuded to gain a complete floor plan. The Team also worked on the building on the east side of the 'Acropolis', called 'Mansion 1'. Careful excavation allowed them to plan more architectural elements than those originally noted by Petrie, and establish the state of preservation of architectural elements.
Work resumed in 1996, and the start of the season was spent excavating a building Petrie called the 'Guardhouse'. A well-paved mud-brick court was discovered, and the plan of the building would now appear to be that of a small Middle Kingdom temple.
They then moved over to the eastern gateway of the town. On the outside of the town, Millet and his team located, two long, parallel mud-brick approach walls, leading towards the gate. The wall incorporates staircases that lead up from the gate approach-way, to the higher natural terrain, through which the approach-way runs. More mud-brick paving was found within the town, just inside of the gateway, suggesting that this main east-west street was paved.
'Mansion 1' was again re-excavated, and some of the most western rooms had walls surviving to one metre high, and bore traces of painted plaster decoration. The Team returned to complete some further clearance of 'Mansion 1' in the spring of 1997.
After this investigation was recorded the Team moved to the pyramid site of Senwosret II. Work began on clearing the east face of the pyramid to restudy the superstructure of the pyramid. The pyramid is built upon natural knoll of rock, which was cut to shape to accommodate the pyramid. Above this bedrock the pyramid it is built from unbaked mud brick, and was originally cased in carved limestone blocks.
A gridiron of massive limestone walls was built within the lower part of the pyramid. The archaeologist, Sir Flinders Petrie, believed that this was to give firm support to the stone casing, and prevent it from slipping by settlement of the mud brick core. The architectural survey by the Royal Ontario Museum discovered more stone masonry than previously suspected.
The season concluded with a tentative study of the remains of the pyramid temple on the eastern side of the pyramid. This is a partnering element of the funerary complex of Senwosret I that we know little about.