Skilled, Fed, and Honoured:

This paper presents the bioarchaeological, dietary, and administrative evidence bearing on the identity and treatment of the workforce that built the Giza pyramids — the people themselves, documented through skeletal pathology, medical intervention, dietary provisioning, labour organisation, mortuary treatment, and the historiography of the narrative that has long obscured them. It stands as a companion to this author's prior work on the engineering, motivation, and evidentiary case against external-agent explanations for pyramid construction, and as a self-contained account of the labour force in its own right. Drawing on the excavation of the Heit el-Ghurab settlement and the adjacent workers' cemetery, on zooarchaeological and osteological research spanning three decades, and on the classical sources responsible for the competing slave-gang narrative, this paper shows that the several hundred individuals whose remains have been recovered were rotationally or permanently employed within a named, competitive gang structure; provisioned with a protein-rich diet disbursed through state granaries and breweries; treated for workplace injury with competent and status-independent medical care; exposed to disease on terms set by geography rather than rank; and buried with formal, title-bearing honours in the shadow of the monuments they built.

The evidence converges on a corvée-and-specialist labour model administratively distinct from, and considerably more humane than, either the slave-gang narrative inherited from Herodotus and amplified by twentieth-century cinema, or the uplift narratives that displace the achievement onto external agents.