Preface
To the ancient Egyptians, the Birket Qarun--the lake at the center of the Fayyum Oasis (Figure
2)--was a holy place, sacred to Sobekh, the crocodile god, whose material manifestations swarmed the lake's beaches. This high religious significance was also associated in most periods with considerable economic importance. The fecundity of the Fayyum, based on its wellwatered farmlands and the fish and fowl from the lake itself, was celebrated throughout antiquity.
The 9000 year history of human habitation of the Fayyum has created a diverse archaeological record, and many scholars have studied the Fayyum's antiquities. Our own selection of the
Fayyum as an area for intensive archaeological research in 1981 and 1983 was based largely on the important roles the ancient Fayyumiis played in some of the most significant transformations of Egyptian antiquity, beginning with the origins of an agricultural economy, and culminating in the radical restructuring of Egypt under the Ptolemies. It is one of the fortunate accidents of history that because of the dramatic reduction of the size of the Fayyum lake in the New
Kingdom and later periods, settlements of various early periods were stranded in the desert and thus better preserved than is the archaeological evidence of these changes in most other areas.
This volume is primarily archaeological research we conducted in the Fayyum between June
4th and December 4th, 1981, with some additional material (see Appendices X and X) from research conducted in October and November of 1983. Most of our fieldwork was devoted to making systematic surface collections of artifacts in the southwest portion of the Oasis, but we also conducted excavations, geological tests, and other research (most of which is reported here).
The general objective of our fieldwork and subsequent analyses has been to try to understand the nature and causes of variability in human settlement in the Fayyum, from its earliest period through the medieval era. In the context of analyzing this settlement history we have also been concerned with relating the culture history of the Fayyum to broader cultural trends in the rest of
Egypt, and in adjacent areas.
We concentrated our fieldwork on the Epipaleolithic-Neolithic transition--the period between about 8000 and 4500 BC, when the first agriculturalists appeared in the Fayyum. Generally, we have been concerned with amassing the kinds of data that could be used to evaluate various
"models" of Egyptian agricultural origins. Chapter XX records our investigations of several small "Predynastic" sites", and Appendix X contains the results of our surveys at some of the lesser known Ptolemaic sites on the southside of the Birket Qarun.
Although our general objective here is to relate the archaeological data we produced to specific problems of Egyptian prehistory and history, we have also tried to address broader issues in contemporary archaeology, specifically, the nature of archaeological unit formation and explanation.
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Our analyses are far from complete, but we have decided to publish an intermediate report of our work. It is now clear that we shall require much more time to complete our studies of the extraordinary amount of data we collected, and some of the most important analyses will be in the form of doctoral dissertations that are not yet finished. We have also elected to publish here much of our basic data. We do so in the hope that other interested scholars will find this information of relevance to their own work.
The authors wish to acknowledge the National Science Foundation (Grant BNS8112738) and the United States Agency for International Development (Grant GOE 1) for their generous support of our research in the Fayyum. We are especially grateful to the Egyptian Antiquities
Organization for their cooperation and assistance. We would like to offer our sincere thanks to
Dr. Ahmed Qadry, Dr. Aly al-Khouli, and Mr. Ali Bazidi of the E.A.O. Our work in the Fayyum would not have been possible without the kind assistance of His Excellency Hamdi Hakim, former governor of the Fayyum, or without the help of Nihad el-Faramawi, our E.A.O. colleague in the field.
The difficult, demanding fieldwork--most of it accomplished in the intemperate summer months--was done by most of the contributors to this volume (Douglas Brewer, Paul Buck, Fekri
Hassan, Mary Ellen Lane, Janet Long, Nanette Pyne, Richard Redding, Robert Wenke, Wilma
Wetterstrom) and by Maria Casini, Jeremy Geller, J. Russell Hanely, Marie Hanley, Jill Kaplan,
John Leier, Fraser Neiman, Christine O'Brien-Darby, Donald Ryan, Lucy Nofzinger, and Helen
Vasilika. We greatly appreciate their contributions.
Many of the illustrations were prepared by Nanette M. Pyne, who also organized and administered our household in the Fayyum--all while participating fully in the fieldwork itself.
We would also like to acknowledge the American Research Center in Egypt, particularly Drs.
James Allen and Paul Walker, the directors of A.R.C.E., for assistance in arranging funding from the United States Information Agency, and Madame Attiya Habachi, who facilitated our field operations. Our thanks also to Dr. Norman D. Nicol, for helping us with the preliminary surveys of the project area.
We dedicate this volume to the late Labib Habachi, in admiration of his life and works. He was one of Egypt's preeminent Egyptologists of this century, he had a life-long love of the
Fayyum and its antiquities, but most important, for us, in dedicating this volume to his memory, was his warmth, wit, and wisdom. We shall always miss him.
Robert J. Wenke
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Mary Ellen Lane
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