Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

The early and middle Holocene of North Africa was a time of dramatic climatic and social change, including rapid shifts in vegetation communities and the introduction of domesticated plants and animals. Recent research from the Fayum basin of Egypt, which holds archaeological evidence for early use of domesticates, aims to place inhabitants of that region within their contemporary environmental setting. We present here results of wood charcoal analysis from three early- and middle-Holocene deposits on the north shore of the Fayum and reconstruct both contemporary woodland ecology and patterns of anthropogenic wood use. In total, three woodland communities likely existed in the area, but inhabitants of this region made heavy use of only the local lakeshore woodland, emphasizing tamarisk ( Tamarix sp.) for fuel. While seasonally watered wadi woodlands were not harvested for fuel, more arid locations on the landscape were, evidencing regional mobility between ecological zones. Results indicate that wood was locally abundant and that inhabitants were able to select only preferred species for fuel. This study provides further evidence for low-level food production in the Fayum that preserved critical ecosystem services, rather than dramatic niche construction to promote agriculture as seen elsewhere in middle-Holocene Southwest Asia.

President's Research Catalyst Awards, Grant ID# CA-16-376911, Preserving at-Risk Cultural Heritage.

Recent current events have dramatically highlighted the vulnerability of the world's material cultural heritage. The 3-D Digital Preservation of At-Risk Global Cultural Heritage project, led by Thomas Levy at UC San Diego, catalyzes a collaborative research effort by four University of California campuses (San Diego, Berkeley, Los Angeles and Merced) to use cyberarchaeology and computer graphics for cultural heritage to document and safeguard virtually some of the most at-risk heritage objects and places. Faculty and students involved in this project are conducting path-breaking archaeological research - covering more than 10,000 years of culture and architecture - in Cyprus, Greece, Egypt, Ethiopia, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Turkey, and the United States. This project uses the 3-D archaeological data collected in numerous at-risk heritage places to study, forecast, and model the effects of human conflict, climate change, natural disasters and technological and cultural changes on these sites and landscapes. The greater challenge undertaken by this project is to integrate archaeological heritage data and digital heritage data using the recently-announced Pacific Research Platform (PRP) and its 10-100Gb/s network as well as virtual reality kiosks installed in each participating UC campus. Our aim is to link UC San Diego and the San Diego Supercomputer Center to other labs, libraries and museums at the other UC campuses to form a highly-networked collaborative platform for curation, analysis, and visualization of 3D archaeological heritage data.