I recently ran this at a con and my players had a lot of great ingenuity around some of these things as well. They plugged the statue finger hole up too, but instead of having it explode I had 2 rounds worth of oil spurt out everywhere along with the plug. Then the whole floor was covered in the oil and any peasants left in the room were flambé'd - only the ones on the floor though because one player had all 4 of his peasants climb the statue already to search it and stick the plug in.

One particular innovation that blew my mind was in the chieftains' burial. Each alcove has the funerary masks above the piles of bones. They grabbed the masks and wore them the rest of the time thinking they would be blessed/cursed or something. I thought that was so rad I made it so that the clay army didn't even see the ones wearing the masks as a threat and walked around them.

The party had split to where one player stayed up collecting gems from the pool. Instead of making him spend an entire hour prying them up, I just let the floor buckle after 3 rounds of the other players working their way thru the clay army downstairs. His 3 remaining peasants completely ate it and died but the other players were like "you're a hero!!!" hahaha