How can Egypt’s ancient landscapes be approached, since there are innumerable modern and ancient processes affecting the way sites appear today? All these modern and ancient processes must be considered during project research design. Results need to be checked against what is already known in the area and then verified on the ground. Any type of survey, excavation or coring, will be biased; ancient and modern processes ‘‘select’’ the archaeological evidence that remains, while modern surveying and excavation techniques allow the selection of specific areas for detailed examination. Many techniques (e. g. coring, resistivity and artefact density) are employed to make sure the best areas are chosen for excavation, with satellite remote sensing analysis used to detect past and buried landscapes.
The very nature of ancient site and landscape formation processes in Egypt lends itself to detection from remotely sensed satellite images. Archaeologists have stressed the bias of Egyptian archaeology towards monumental and funerary sites and away from ancient settlements in the Nile Valley and the Delta. In addition, how Egyptologists conduct landscape surveys (to the extent they have been conducted in the past) has been at odds with other regional archaeologists working in the Ancient Near East (Jeffreys 2003: 1-3). Regional survey work in Egyptology had been largely neglected due to this bias and has consequently missed thousands of ancient settlement sites and related landscapes in favor of tombs and temples in places like Luxor. This is now changing (Bietak 1979: 156-60).
Geospatial studies on ancient Egyptian landscapes are beginning to revolutionize our understanding of ancient Egyptian human-environment interactions. They started when RAF pilots took the first aerial photographs of Egypt during the 1920s and 1930s (Rees 1929: 389-406), specifically focusing on large monumental sites in Luxor and Giza. During the Nubian salvage campaign archaeologists employed aerial photography to document landscapes for mapping purposes. (Vercoutter 1976: 2; Zurawski 1993: 243-56.)
Remote sensing has been invaluable for several projects working in Egypt’s desert regions. With the development of remote-sensing monitors such as Landsat and RADAR Missions (SIR-A/B), Wendorf and his team conducted a major archaeological investigation using a SIR-A RADAR image. Through their analysis they detected ‘‘radar rivers,’’ or ancient river channels (some up to fifteen km in width), beneath the sands of the Bir Safsaf in the Western Desert. They carried out survey work in the region, discovering hundreds of new Paleolithic and Neolithic sites along the paleodrainage systems (McHugh etal. 1989: 320-36; McHugh etal.1988a: 1-40; McHugh et al. 1988b: 361-79; Wendorf et al. 1987: 43-63). Another study from Egypt’s western desert used ASTER data to create Digital Elevation Models in determining the Holocene land use potential of the region. Analysis found that site placement matched the potential water catchment areas (Bubenzer and Bolten 2003:2). At the site of Widan el-Faras in the northern Fayum, a Corona image was used to map work in a basalt quarry (Bloxam and Storemeyr 2002: 23-36).
Other recent work includes a Japanese team identifying areas for reconnaissance around pyramid sites using a variety of satellite images. Identifying the spectral signatures of limestone monuments and other methods of analysis gave the team thirty-eight possible sites buried beneath the sand. Ground-truthing revealed that four of the sites contained such remains. Subsequent excavations led to the discovery of a late-Eighteenth or early-Nineteenth Dynasty tomb measuring 47 m in length (Yoshimura et al. 1997: 3-24). The South Sinai Survey and Excavation Project incorporated both surface survey work and the application of multiple analytical techniques to Landsat satellite images to detect new and already identified archaeological sites in el-Markha Plain along the west Sinai coast. The satellite image clarified regions with dense vegetation clusters and showed that modern vegetation beside known archaeological sites reflected ancient water sources (Mumford and Parcak 2002). A Czech team has incorporated Quickbird imagery and subsurface survey to gain a better overall understanding of the pyramid fields at Abusir in creating a GIS for the region (Barta and Bruna 2005: 3-7). Work at el-Amarna (Parcak 2005) has shown how features beneath the desert can be recorded on Quickbird imagery (which has a resolution of 0.6 m).
The author’s satellite archaeology work in diverse parts of Egypt has revealed the complexity of attempting to locate last landscapes hidden beneath and within modern ones. Although ancient Egypt contains many significant historical and archaeological areas, such as national, provincial, and cultic centres, smaller areas need to be chosen as study models for remote sensing analysis and ground survey. The author chose two main study areas in the Delta and Middle Egypt for initial satellite archaeology work. There is a total of 33,000 km2 of fertile land in Nile Valley and Delta, with the Delta covering 22,000 km2 and 160 km x 250 km in area. The East Delta survey area measured 40 km x 50 km, representing 11% of the entire Delta, while the Middle Egypt area measured 15 km x 30 km, representing 3% of the Nile Valley landscape.
The regions chosen in Middle Egypt (near el-Amarna) and the Delta (in the landscape surrounding Tell Tebilla) have much in common topographically but differ in their historical and archaeological significance. Both areas encompass relatively flat floodplains. In contrast, mountains and undulating landscapes can often obscure archaeological sites and are often trickier regions for satellite remote-sensing work. Flood plains facilitate locating new and known archaeological sites as many stand metres above the surrounding landscapes (Parcak 2009b: 128-30).
In Middle Egypt, there is potential for long-term continuous site occupation along a more stable river course, unlike the Delta where more dramatic river course changes
Have caused greater settlement shifts. Furthermore, destruction from looting and modern development has obliterated more archaeological sites in the Delta, while relatively less intensive site destruction in Middle Egypt allows more sites to be located and safeguarded. The studies used previous satellite archaeology work across the globe for comparison, as no large-scale satellite archaeology work had yet been conducted in Egypt’s floodplains. Satellite imagery used for the study included Corona imagery, Landsat, ASTER, and Quickbird satellite images, and Shuttle RADAR Topography Mission data. One of the principal issues was using the multispectral capabilities of the satellite imagery to differentiate between ancient settlements and the modern towns covering them. This was achieved by running algorithms to detect the ancient soil, which had higher moisture content than the modern soil due to a higher concentration of organic debris. The study detected
Figure 1.5 Landsat satellite image showing a large area in Middle Egypt. The darker pixels indicate areas of archaeological interest. Image Courtesy of NASA.
44 previously unknown ancient sites in the Delta, and 43 in Middle Egypt. These were ground truthed during surveys and follow up archaeological work from 2003 to 2007.
The study revealed that thousands of ancient settlements and associated landscapes remained to be discovered in both the Delta and Nile Valley floodplains. Modern and ancient processes have combined to make detection of these past landscapes difficult but not impossible. The diversity of landscapes (desert, agricultural/floodplain) and associated settlement types in Egypt mean archaeologists should employ as many ancient landscape detection techniques as possible.
World History
