This income was distributed to the thousands of people who lived nearby and who constructed and maintained the royal pyramids and tombs of high officials. At the intersection of the Valley and the Delta, the pyramids were at the core of an internal colonization that established Egypt as a territorial state.

The Koch-Ludwig excavations at Giza have discovered storage buildings, bakeries, and camp sites at the southeastern base of the Giza Plateau. A huge stone wall that limits the area on the north is fitted with a tall gate that opened to the harbors of the pyramids of Khafre and Menkaure. Here boats delivered materials from the provinces. Farther to the east, recent excavations have revealed evidence of Old Kingdom settlement below the buildings of the modern city. The ancient remains stretch more than two kilometers along the base of the plateau. This town might have been the location of the royal residence during the time in which the pyramids were constructed.

The gigantic funerary monuments of the 4th Dynasty kings may dominate the Giza Plateau, but the area also includes the remains of workshops, houses, and cemeteries of the priests and workers belonging to these funerary establishments. The remains found in these humbler structures offer invaluable evidence for the functions of the various buildings.

Pottery vessels were widely used for storing, preparing, and serving food and drink. They were also used for food offerings in the temples and funerary chapels.

A bakery of the Pyramid Age was discovered in 1992 at Giza by the Koch-Ludwig Giza Project. The ancient bakers made large conical loaves of emmer or barley bread in these ceramic pots. Egyptologists have long known that bread and beer were the basic rations for laborers. Some believe that pot-baked bread was for special occasions like temple festivals and that the workers would have been fed a simpler bread like pita.

Tomb scenes of the Pyramid Age illustrate the production of bedja-bread:
STEP 1: The bakers mixed the dough in large vats, then poured it, apparently liquid, into bedjapots.
STEP 2: They stacked the pots over an open hearth with the interiors pointing down toward the hot coals.
STEP 3: They placed another pot upside down as a lid to seal the dough, making the pots a kind of portable oven.
STEP 4: The bakers supplied heat by surrounding the pots with hot coals and ashes.
STEP 5: They removed the lids (probably with sticks) and the lower pot with the bread. After cooling, they removed the bread.

Archaeologists found two bakery rooms at Giza. Just inside an entrance in the southwest corner of each room lay many broken bread pots, the lids of which were probably discarded after the last batch of bread was removed. Three vats in the northwest corner were used for water, flour and ferment (this was sour dough). A hole in the floor alongside the west wall indicates a fourth missing vat in which the bakers mixed dough. They stacked and heated pots on an open hearth in the southeast corner. These were used as preheated lids to cover the dough-filled pots. They completed the baking in egg-carton shaped trenches, with a hole for each bread pot, along the east wall. The prevailing northwesterly wind blew the smoke away from the work site. The low walls of stone and mud served as counter tops for bread pots and finished loaves.

A 1993 National Geographicexperimental replication of this bakery in Egypt demonstrated that edible sourdough emmer loaves can be produced from this baking process. Each loaf was large and dense enough to feed several people. This may have been an economical mode of producing large masses of staple food for quick consumption.