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Re-Thinking Burial Dates At A Graeco-Roman Cemetery: Fag El Gamous, Fayoum, Egypt, Kerry Muhlestein, R. Evans, David Whitchurch

Kerry Muhlestein

The Fag el-Gamous cemetery is a 125 hectare Graeco-Roman necropolis on the eastern edge of the Fayoum Depression. The 1000 + burials excavated to date at the cemetery are found largely in rectangular shafts at 0.3–3.0 m deep and oriented on an east–west axis. The high burial density, varying between 1.3 and 3.0 burials per square meter, is due in part to multiple burials in the same shaft. The stratigraphically deepest burials in a shaft are buried head east and later burials in the same shaft are buried head west. It has been argued that this directional shift occurred as …