The scope of LIFE was to offer a complete set of archaeological and environmental data to be used to investigate Late Roman settlements along frontier desert areas and to reconstruct the underlying strategy to control the empire’s desert edges. The case study of this project is the chain of Late Roman fortified settlements that punctuate the Kharga Oasis, located in Egypt’s Western Desert, that in the Fourth Century represented a portion of the southern boundary of the Roman empire. All these sites, located in a remote and harsh environment, share the same architectural features and are all endowed with similar agricultural installations, thus suggesting the existence of a highly motivated, large-scale strategy of occupation of the region.
The best-preserved site is Umm al-Dabadib, which contains the virtually intact remains of both a Fourth Century AD settlement and its contemporary, imposing, agricultural system. These two elements were planned to function together, as one could not exist without the other, and offer a unique chance to study the installation of a community in a semi-desert environment, along what was at that time the southern frontier of the Roman empire. The binary nature of the remains is mirrored by the organisation of the research team: the archaeological and architectural remains are being studied by the Politecnico di Milano, Host Institution, whilst the agricultural system is the focus of the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Partner Institution.
The research team studied Umm al-Dabadib from several points of view: the analysis of the archaeological remains casti a new light on the origins and characteristics of its inhabitants, whilst the study of the agricultural system yielded important evidence on the adaptation of irrigation and cultivation techniques to the desert environment. The crucial point of the entire project is, indeed, the investigation on how people adapted (their lifestyle, their architecture, their agriculture, their systems to control the territory) to different environmental conditions.
The need to adapt ended up involving ourselves as well: the most difficult challenge that we had to face is the fact that, due to the geopolitical instability of the region, the Western Desert was closed to foreign archaeologistsfrom 2016 to 2022 - just the expected length of the ERC-funded project. This meant re-designing the project accordingly. The way in which we circumvented this major issue is to create technological antennae to probe, touch and analyse the site from the distance, a bit like ground-controlled unmanned spacecrafts do. We working on a combination of old photographs, 3D surveys acquired just before the desert was closed, satellite images and digital elaborations of data, from which we could indeed retrieve fresh information on the site and on the region, but made of different stuff: they are not material, but immaterial finds. Indeed, a side-effect of this course of action was the possibility to investigate in detail how to successfully combine digital and material culture in order to reveal information and data that would otherwise be invisible or go unnoticed. In collaboration with Museo Egizio, Torino, we invested on developing tools and systems to increase the quality and speed up the acquisition of data on the field, to be applied in logistically and environmentally challenging archaeological expeditions, to be ready to work in a fast and effective way.
The desert re-opened to archaeologists just in the last year of the project: we could go back to the field and test all our hypotheses and all proved to be right.
Of course the research on this remote and complex site is far from being exhausted - actually, lots of new questions are now on the table. But this is the nature of research and of fieldwork: the ERC project represented the first harvest of the seeds that were planted, and that will keep germinating over the years. This aspect reveals, I believe, the true nature and importance of ERC grants.
