Reassessing ancient Egyptian crops, crop husbandry and the agrarian landscape

The main focus of the project is to provide a well-integrated reassessment of the diversity, distribution and use of Egyptian crops, crop husbandry and the agrarian landscape through the systematic compilation and analysis of Egyptian archaeobotanical data which will also be integrated with the textual, artistic and ethnohistorical evidence for crops and other species in order to create a more powerful methodology for understanding the complex processes of ancient Egyptian agriculture than the use of any single source of evidence alone. Although derived from often disparate datasets, the database aims to provide a consistent baseline for a direct comparison between taxa, sites, periods, and regions, types of preservation, etc. There is no doubt that the objective and replicable models produced by the recording and integration of the archaeobotanical and Egyptological datasets will have relevance to broader themes in archaeology, Egyptology, archaeobotany, agronomy, environmental landscape studies, etc.