You might think this would make the search for Pi-Ramesse easy. But you'd be wrong.
Well, the big problem of finding Pi-Ramesse was the problem of the eastern branch of the Nile which we know it lay on had gone.
Over time. the branches of the Nile in the Delta often change course. So it's impossible to know where the easternmost branch was in Ramesses' time. This ancient branch of the Nile had silted up and disappeared long ago. Without this knowledge, finding the lost city would mean scouring the whole eastern side of the Nile Delta. The absence of this single most important clue was a crucial obstacle to finding Ramesses capital. Luckily archaeologists knew exactly what remains to look for because ancient texts have given a detailed description of Pi-Ramesse.
First thing we knew about Pi-Ramesse was that it was a military garrison. It was the place from which King Ramesses II launched his campaigns into Syria-Palestine. Therefore, the presence of soldiers, chariotry would clearly have to be something which any candidate for the site(s) of Pi-Ramesse would have to have. Well, we certainly expect in Pi-Ramesse to have a lot of statues and other monuments of Ramesses II.
Ramesses had a production line of workers in quarries churning out statues of himself carved out of the living rock. Pi-Ramesse was filled with hundreds of images of the pharaoh. Some as big as 28 meters high. Next, Ramesses II's personal mark, his cartouche would have been carved into the city's great monuments. Each cartouche was like a brand, placed on objects as a stamp of ownership.
Look here at the cartouche here of Ramesses. Here this seated figure with a hawk's head and a sun disc on its head is the sun god Ra. We then go down to this sign here which reads Messe. And the following two signs read Shu. So we have Ra, Messe, Shu. This is married or beloved. And then the sign on the top left-hand corner of the cartouche which is the great god Amon, the king of the gods.
cartouche: an oval or oblong figure in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics that encloses characters expressing the names or epithets of royal or divine personages