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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - L.I.F.E. (LIVING IN A FRINGE ENVIRONMENT - Investigating occupation and exploitation of desert frontier areas in the Late Roman Empire)

Teaser

Summary

The scope of LIFE is 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 empireâ€™s desert edges. The case study of this project is the chain of Late Roman fortified settlements that punctuate the Kharga Oasis, located in Egyptâ€™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 harsh, 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 UniversitÃ degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Partner Institution.
The research team is studying Umm al-Dabadib from several points of view: the analysis of the archaeological remains is casting a new light on the origins and characteristics of its inhabitants, whilst the study of the agricultural system is providing important evidence on the adaptation of irrigation and cultivation techniques to the desert environment. The study of the historical sources, planned for the second part of the project, will attempt a reconstruction of the Late Roman strategy of control and defence of the Western Desert. One of 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 are facing is the fact that, due to the instability of the region, the Western Desert has been closed to foreign archaeologists since 2016, right after the project started. This means that we cannot physically go there, we cannot excavate and we cannot retrieve fresh physical information. The way in which we are circumventing 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 are working on 3D surveys acquired just before the desert was closed, on satellite images shot from the space and on mathematical elaborations of data, from which we can indeed retrieve fresh information on the site and on the region, but made of different stuff: they are not material, but digital finds.
This situation has progressively enhanced another important aspect of the project, that is the possibility to successfully combine digital and material culture in order to reveal information and data that would otherwise be invisible or go unnoticed. We are therefore investing 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 once we are allowed to go on the field. We are currently developing and testing our systems and tools in collaboration with the Museo Egizio, Torino, both on their collection and on their fieldwork.
Even if the geopolitical situation is currently preventing us from performing our fieldwor

Work performed

We have been working on four lines of research: i) the elaboration of the raw data of the 3D survey and the ensuing study of the results; ii) the reconstruction of the ancient agricultural system; iii) the implementation of innovative techniques to speed up and improve the acquisition of digital data on the field; iv) the identification of innovative tools and methods to share the results of the various lines of research. All these activities have been accompanied by the preparation of scientific publications already published or currently under evaluation by peer-review journals.
The first area of research is yielding interesting and unexpected results: the careful evaluation of the three-dimensional data collected on the field is producing fresh information on how the settlement was planned and built, which, in turn, is providing important information to be confronted with historical sources.
The second is based on a complex interaction of archaeological data and mathematical models, and will result in the construction of a dynamic model to be used to simulate how the system worked and evolved.
The third consists of identifying and testing on the field the most efficient survey methods and software in order to speed up the phase of the acquisition of the data, keeping the same high level of precision and accuracy of more traditional and expensive methods.
The fourth focuses on identifying and elaborating the most efficient methods to share the information from the other lines of research of the project. 3D data can be flattened and published on paper, but the best and most efficient way to exploit and share their potential is to work with them in a 3D environment. We have been thus working on two museum installations: one, dedicated to the three-dimensional survey of the stratigraphy of an excavation and to the submillimetric survey of finds on display at Museo Egizio, Torino as part of the exhibition Archeologia Invisibile (March 2019-January 2020) and one, dedicated to the combination of three-dimensional data at different scales, in preparation at the Musei delle Scienze Agrarie, UniversitÃ di Napoli Federico II.

Final results

The project will continue to develop the four lines of investigation described above, with the addition of a historical study of the written and archaeological sources dating to the Late Roman Period. One aspect of the project that is pending is the possibility to finally start the archaeological excavation of select areas of Umm al-Dabadib, currently hampered by security issues in the Western Desert. If the situation improves, we will be able to add further, important, material information to our knowledge of the site and of the area. If this does not happen, we will focus on retrieving information from the distance, probing the site without touching it.
At the end of the project we will present a new, detailed study of the site based on the available information within an innovative framework combining old information, new tools, historical sources and mathematical models; in other words, combining digital and material culture in an innovative way.