Marsden grant for Egypt dig

17 October 2011

Professor Simon Holdaway, Head of Anthropology, has won a Marsden grant to study climate change and origins of agriculture in ancient Egypt.

The grant will enable Simon and a team of students from the University to complete archaeological fieldwork in the Fayum region of Northern Egypt.

His study, titled ‘The agricultural foundations of Predynastic Egypt: climate change and opportunism in the Fayum’ has received $670,000 for three years from the Royal Society of New Zealand fund.

Agriculture and domestication of animals were late to arrive in Egypt. Professor Holdaway suggests environmental change may have something to do with this.

The Fayum contains some of the earliest evidence of agriculture in the region, from around 4500-4000 BC, prior to the age of Pharaohs and Nile-based agriculture.

A brief period of sustained winter rains at this time correlates with a period of intense habitation in the Fayum – suggesting humans responded to their environment by establishing a short lived, permanent agricultural community, that ultimately failed.

“If so, this places a new perspective on Pharaonic, Nile-based irrigation agriculture suggesting it developed as a result of a climate change-induced failure of a previous system, well after agriculture was established in Egypt.

“This result is important at a time when the human response to climate change is increasingly seen as something related only to the present. It demonstrates how climate changes must be understood not as single causes but from a framework of human environmental interrelationships that have a long history.”

Professor Holdaway has led two previous seasons of fieldwork in the Fayum. He will return to the region with a New Zealand team and colleagues from UCLA to determine the chronology of settlement and test the proposed correlations with environmental change.