Project Description: This project supports a collaborative research between Dr. Renee Friedman, Anthropology Department, University of Alaska at Fairbanks and Dr. Ahmed Fahmy, Department of Biology, University of Helwan, Helwan, Egypt. They plan to study organic and inorganic plant remains from Hierakonpolis in a contribution to palaeoethnobotany of Egypt. The project is to foster partnership with Egyptian scientific departments, provide research tools and training required to undertake macro and micro archaeobotanical research and integrate that with archaeological collection strategies in order to explore a range of information deriving from botanical material from the archaeological site of Hierakonpolis, Egypt. Egyptian regulations forbid the export of any archaeological materials.
Intellectual merit: 1) Understanding of human interaction with plants in Ancient Egypt is based on inferential sources such as tooth wear, food offerings, and botanical remains retrieved from archaeological sediments. The recovery of a significant sample of well-preserved ingested food remains in the abdominal cavities of "working-class" human burials at the site of Hierakonpolis (c.3800-3400BC) allows a rare opportunity to test various assumptions on subsistence, environment and climate at this formative stage in Ancient Egyptian civilization with non-circumstantial evidence. The extraction of the full range of information from this material requires an integrated approach to the analysis, which includes the identification of organic macro-remains (e.g., fruits, seeds) as well as inorganic micro-remains, i.e., phytoliths. Fossil phytolith analysis is a new tool for palaeoethnobotanical research in Egypt. It holds great promise for recovering previously inaccessible information. 2) Phytolith studies can also reveal evidence captured in calculus on the teeth of humans and animals to provide information on longer-term diet. This in turn can be compared with observations derived from other dental dietary indicators and the evidence of consumed or offered foods. 3) The integrated archaeobotanical analysis of the working-class burials is further enhanced by the opportunity to analyze data from the contemporaneous burials of the elite and contrast both data sets with material from a domestic structure of the same time period. Together these analyses present an unprecedented body of evidence to assess human/plant interaction at the dawn of Egyptian civilization, a time of dynamic social and economic development that has been linked to climatic change. The project is designed to allow the collection of useful information while developing integrated collection strategies, expanding research facilities and training of students.
Broader impact: 1) the development of a dedicated archaeobotanical research laboratory in Egypt of use to the international botanical, archaeological and geological communities; 2) train and provide hands-on experience for US and Egyptian senior scientists and students; 3) create guidelines for the collection of archaeobotanical remains to be distributed in English and Arabic, as the rise in water table due to increased land reclamation activities all over Egypt is making archaeological remains an endangered and even diminishing resource; 4) increase understanding for the scholarly and general public about the environment and climate change in the past and its effect on lifeways: how we learn about these aspects and how they are inter-related. The results will be published in peer reviewed archaeological and archaeobotanical journals, and updates and reports for the lay audience will be placed in the Hierakonpolis expedition's Nekhen News newsletter and on its website www.hierakonpolis.org and that of the American Institute of Archaeology www.archaeology.org. The archaeo-botanical material will be permanently curated in Egypt for further study. This project is being supported under the US-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these cooperative activities.
