This grant will be for the publication of the American regional survey in the south-western Nile Delta, conducted between 1977 and 1983 by W.D.E. Coulson, with A. Leonard Jr. and N. Wilkie, which, apart from fieldwork at Naukratis itself, was never published owing to Coulson’s illness and untimely death.
The survey encompassed all ancient sites in an area of ca. 800km2 in the western Nile Delta, around and to the west of the ancient Egyptian-Greek city of Naukratis/Kom Geif, from el-Barnugi in the north to Kom el-Hisn in the south. More extensive work was carried out at the important site of Kom Firin, nearby Kom Dahab, Kom Barud and Kom Kortas. The aim was to understand the ancient towns of the western Nile Delta in their cultural and socio-economic landscape.
The project was a bold attempt to investigate a previously largely unstudied area using modern survey and excavation techniques. To this date it remains the most significant archaeological exploration of the region and an invaluable record of the cultural heritage of this fast-changing landscape, where many sites have since suffered significant destruction and which remain under constant threat.
Excellent field documents and large numbers of finds are available for first-hand study and analysis and will allow a team of archaeologists with extensive relevant experience to make this pioneering research finally available to scholarship. Covering the history of a significant region from the 3rd millennium BC to the late 1st millennium AD, the publication will provide insights into the scale and resolution of settlements within a dynamic landscape that was a significant inter-cultural contact zone. It will create a robust corpus of data against which future fieldwork can be measured and which will form a basis on which to address wider questions, both preserving and making public the memory of the region.
The publication project is directed by Alexandra Villing and Neal Spencer.
