Weekly Websites - Dakhleh Oasis

Dakhleh Oasis Project (Monash University)

The Dakhleh Oasis Project (DOP) is a long-term regional study of the interaction between environmental changes and human activity in the closed area of the Dakhleh Oasis, Western Desert of Egypt, but including the larger area of the Palaeoasis. The study includes all the time since the first incursion of humans in the Middle Pleistocene, perhaps 400,000 years ago, down to the 21st century oasis farmers, and all the human activity and all the changing environmental conditions for which there is evidence within the time period.

To achieve such an assessment, it is necessary to gather data on the modern environment and all past environmental conditions. The environment is seen as one of the most important influences on all human activity. The evidence for this is sought in the geological, geomorphological, the botanical and the faunal records. These data are collected by various field workers, specialists in their particular fields, who ultimately will provide a consensus of the environmental history of the region. The DOP environmentalists to date are Professor R. F. Giegengack, Jr., Dr. Jennifer Smith, Professor C. S. Churcher, Dr. Ursula Thanheiser and Mag. Johannes Walter. Formerly, there have also been Professor J. C. Ritchie and Professor I. A. Brookes.

Man's activities within these environmental settings must be investigated by a wide range of expertise. The settling and development of cultural evolution within the oasis area, the expansion into and from other Saharan regions and, of course, connections with the Nile Valley are all of interest. These studies are performed by geoarchaeologists, Old Stone Age African specialists, Holocene-Neolithic archaeologists, historical periods specialists - Pharaonic, Ptolemaic-Roman-Christian archaeologists, Islamic archaeologists; by physical anthropologists, and by linguists.

Dakhleh Trust

Surrounded by the sands of the Sahara, the Dakhleh Oasis lies approximately 500 km south west of Cairo and 325 km due west of Luxor, with an area of 1,500 sq.km.

A broad based study of the Oasis has been in progress since 1977 when an international team of natural scientists, archaeologists, and anthropologists began research on the interaction between environmental change and human activity and its impact on the landscape.

Findings that can help to deal with the major challenge of climate change.

The Oasis lies 600 kms south west of Cairo and 250 kms due west of Luxor. With an area of 2000 sq. kms, it is surrounded by the sands of the Sahara.

Click here to view our interactive map.

Over 500,000 years ago nomadic hunter-gatherers came to the Dakhleh area in pursuit of prey and to collect material for their tools. Since 6000 BCE the Oasis has been continuously inhabited.

When the Ancient Egyptians came from the Nile Valley in about 2300 BCE they altered the landscape by introducing crops and farming practices from the valley. In Greek and Roman times the population increased with the establishment of several sizeable towns. The area flourished during the Christian times and on into the Islamic medieval period. It declined somewhat during the Ottoman period but is now again a significant centre.

Preliminary Report on the Study Season 2004 of the ACACIA Project in the Western Desert (Rudolph Kuper, Heiko Riemer, Karin Kindermann, Olaf Bubenzer)

The 2004 season of the ACACIA project focussed on the study of material from Prehistoric, Protohistoric and Pharaonic sites excavated or surveyed during the last three years in theWestern Desert north and southwest of Dakhla Oasis. Despite the material from the Prehistoric and Protohistoric sites of the Egyptian Limestone Plateau, the Pharaonic material

is related to the Abu Ballas Trail that were the object of the 2002 and 2003 ACACIA reports for ASAE. The new evidence fromdifferent sites of the Trail adds a number of details, however, it does not change the general scenario that was drawn in the former reports as well as in other preliminary publications (KUPER, R. 2001; KUPER 2003; FÖRSTER/ KUPER 2003). For that reason, the following paper will concentrate on the new evidence derived fromthe study of the Prehistoric and Protohistoric material of the Egyptian Limestone Plateau. There a hugh number of archaeological sites can be dated to the Holocene wet phase, c. 9500-5000 BC (calibrated). These sites were surveyed and excavated between 1998 and 2002, and the 2004 study campaign is hoped to be the last session on material before the final publication forthcoming. Only very little material can be dated to the period between 5000 BC and the beginning of the Egyptian occupation in the oases in the 4th Dynasty, because the desert then was dried up and the people concentrated in the oases and the Nile Valley. However, a valuable assemblage of pottery, stone artefacts and other archaeological remains was collected fromthe El Karafish desert area north of Dakhla Oasis. It might represent a desert outpost of the Sheikh Muftah cultural unit that is dated to the period from the Late Predynastic to the end of the Old Kingdom.

The last objective to which this paper should point, is the great role that remote sensing cartography and digital elevation models of satellite data can play for survey and reconnaissance programmes in field archaeology. Moreover, it helped to classify the physiographic landscape units and topographic features of the remote desert territories for

which useful maps do not yet exist. These is a fundament for archaeological survey interpretation that has to include the relations and adaptational patterns of human settlement activities as a response to past environment.

NYU Excavations at Amheida

The excavations undertaken at the ancient city of Amheida (known as Trimithis in the Roman period) are a unique combination of archaeological fieldwork and educational program. Although primarily a modern, multidisciplinary excavation, the project also offers undergraduate students the opportunity for a study-abroad semester in Egypt that combines fieldwork with classroom study and visits to archaeological sites and museums. We make our ongoing work on site available internationally to both scholarly and public audiences via the web as well as through printed work.

The Amheida project was started at Columbia University in 2001. Since 2008, New York University is the primary sponsoring institution, with Columbia University continuing as a partner in the project.

The excavations at Amheida collaborate with other participating groups in the Dakhleh Oasis Project, an international venture now three decades old dedicated to studying the interaction between human settlement and the environment over the long span from the earliest human presence in the oasis to modern times. Amheida itself has remains spanning nearly three millennia, and paleolithic material is found along its fringes.

The first five years of excavation have focused on three areas of this very large site: an upper-class fourth-century AD house with wall paintings, an adjoining school, and underlying remains of a Roman bath complex; a more modest house of the third century; and the temple hill, with remains of the Temple of Thoth built in the first century AD and of earlier structures. Architectural conservation has protected and partly restored two standing funerary monuments, a mud-brick pyramid and a tower tomb, both of the Roman period.

Impact glass at the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt: evidence for a cratering event or large aerial burst? (G. R. Osinski, A. F. C. Haldemann, H. P. Schwarcz, J. R. Smith, M. R. Kleindienst, J. Kieniewicz, C. S. Churcher)

Impact cratering is an important geological process that affects all planetary objects with a solid surface. Hypervelocity impact craters (or meteorite impact craters) are the most visible product of hypervelocity impact. They form when a projectile is large and coherent (~20 m for an iron object and ~50 m for a stony body) enough "to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere with little or no deceleration and to strike the ground at virtually its original cosmic velocity (>11 km/s)" [1]. At smaller diameters, the projectile is slowed down by passage through the Earth's atmos-phere and penetration craters are formed (e.g., the Sikhote-Alin crater field in Russia, formed from a me-teorite shower in 1947). Large aerial bursts, or air-bursts, are not well understood, but they represent an important class of impact event that either do not form craters, or which form very shallow structures that are easily erased [2].

In this study, we report on the discovery of unusual silicate glasses – the Dakhleh Glass (DG) – from the Dakhleh Oasis, Western Desert, Egypt. Recent work indicates that the Dakhleh Glass formed from an im-pact event ~150 ka during Middle Stone Age occupa-tions [3]. However, no source crater has been recog-nized to date. Importantly, the glasses are not tektites, which leaves two possible explanations: (1) the glasses represent the proximal ejecta from an unknown source crater somewhere in the Dakhleh Oasis region, or (2) the glasses formed from a large aerial burst.

Spaceborn Radar Image - SIR C/X SAR (NASA)

This spaceborne radar image shows the eastern edge of the Dakhla Oasis in the Western Desert of Egypt, about 600 kilometers (370 miles) south of Cairo. The bright white stripe running from the lower left to the upper right of the image is created as the radar signal bounces off the eroded cliff faces of the Kharga Escarpment. The diagonal purple and yellow stripes in the upper left are rock outcrops of limestone, shale and chalk from the Cretaceous period. The villages of Balat, Bashindi and Tineida, built on recent dry lake deposits, are shown in the lower center and lower left of the image. Although parts of these villages date back to 2000 B.C., agricultural practices have expanded greatly in recent years as part of a development known as the "New Valley." The white features below and to the right of the villages are outcrops of Nubian sandstone, the construction material used to build many of the Pharaohs' temples. Scientists are using radar imaging in desert areas to study structural geology, mineral exploration, ancient climates, water resources and archaeology. This image was acquired by Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) onboard the space shuttle Endeavour on April 14, 1994. The image is 50.0 kilometers by 43.5 kilometers (31.0 miles by 27.0 miles) and is centered at 25.5 degrees north latitude, 29.3 degrees east longitude. North is toward the upper left. The colors are assigned to different radar frequencies and polarizations of the radar as follows: red is L-band, horizontally transmitted and received; green is L-band, horizontally transmitted, vertically received; and blue is C-band, horizontally transmitted and received. SIR-C/X-SAR, a joint mission of the German, Italian and United States space agencies, is part of NASA's research program called Mission to Planet Earth.

Images of Deir el Hagar (Alain Guilleux)

Excellent collection of photographs of the Roman temple.

Le temple de Deir el Hagar (ou Deir el Haggar) , le "monastère des pierres" a été construit sous Néron, Vespasien, Titus et Domitien.

Page's Dakhleh Dakhleh excavation snapshots

I don't know Page's last name, but she kindly sent me links to her website which records the time she spent working on an archaeological excavation in Dakhleh Oasis.

Egypt Sites - A guided tour of Dakhleh Oasis (Su Bayfield)

In ancient times Dakhla was known as Zeszes, the ‘Place of the Two Swords’, because it is divided into two distinct areas. It has also been called el-Wah, the ‘Inner Oasis’ and is an area of around 2000 square kilometres, bounded on the west by the Great Sand Sea, on the north by a high limestone escarpment and on the east by the Abu Tartur Plateau. From el-Kharga, the trip to the eastern edge of the Dakhla Oasis, covers 150km travelling along the ancient Darb el-Ghubari desert track, through some spectacular dune-fields. If coming from the north and Farafra, the distance is around 230km. Although smaller than Kharga Oasis, Dakhla is the most highly-populated region in the Wadi el-Gedid, or ‘New Valley’ - the name, since 1958, by which the oases of Kharga, Dakhla and Farafra are known. The government of Egypt is working to unleash the full potential of these desert areas, with plans to further develop agriculture, mineral resources, industry and tourism.