We started off the New Year continuing the cleaning off of the North Palace’s impressive enclosure wall on the south side of the palace.

Although we had a trimmed staff and a short week for Christmas, we managed to get quite a lot accomplished.

This week we sadly said goodbye to Tony Crosby who returned to Texas after finishing the reconstruction of House D.

This week, we continued cleaning House D, and Tony Crosby began reconstructing the walls of the structure with modern unbaked mud brick made to match the original and set in a pattern that mimics the bonding pattern used in the original construction.

We started back at the site this week.

Our last week at the site was a busy one finishing up as much of the restoration of the ‘South Palace’ we could for this year and then backfilling and covering up the exposed ancient brickwork to protect it until next season.

We had hoped to get an extension on our permission in order to work through January,

Merry Christmas, our week was broken up by the holiday.

We made a lot of progress in our first full week at the site.

Piet Collet and I arrived in Luxor on December 10 on the night train from Cairo.