Tell el-Amarna
TA 30.31 579. T.34.4 = Tell el Amarna, excavations of the winter of 1930-1931, Find No.579, from Grid-square T34, feature 4
The following overview of excavation marks at Tell el-Amarna in use by the Egypt Exploration Society in the 1920s and 1930s is by Dr Anna Stevens from her small finds database (http://www.amarnaproject.com/pages/recent_projects/material_culture/smal...):
"The original object numbering system started from no. 1 each year and prefixed to each number two digits to represent the year in which the excavation season started. Thus object number 26 recorded during the 1921 season appeared as 21/26. Occasionally, several different objects are listed under the one registration number. Usually, the excavators distinguished between them by means of lower case letters added as suffixes to the registration number (e.g. 21/26a), a system followed here, with each object listed in a separate row. At times, however, these suffixes were not added. It has been felt unwise to add them at this stage, so the objects are simply listed on separate rows, each assigned the same registration number.
In two seasons, two parallel registers of objects were maintained, each beginning at number 1. This is the case for the 1923 excavations, when one register was kept for finds from the North Palace and another for finds from the remainder of the excavation. Both began with the number 23/1. In the database, the material from the North Palace has been given an 'N' suffix (e.g. 23N/1). During the 1926 season, pieces of inscribed stone were recorded in a sequence that ran in parallel to the remaining finds, but were distinguished by the excavators themselves with an 'S' suffix. This has been retained in the database.
In places, gaps exist in the sequence. Sometimes these are single numbers. It is likely that these are numbers that were inadvertently skipped or used then abandoned. In a few cases, larger groups of numbers are unused. These perhaps represent spare or unused numbers; future work may clarify this."
