Settlement Patterns in the greater Dayr al-Barsha region. An archaeological investigation of settlement dynamics in the northeastern Hare nome

Ancient Egypt is a land of temples, pyramids and mummies. But these extraordinary achievements were generated by a society which remains poorly understood. Barely studied questions concern the form and nature of settlement patterns and its embeddedness in the environment. Egyptology has usually approached such daily life issues based on texts and tomb scenes, but these invariably derive from the context of the elite, and only draw a very coloured picture of ancient realities. Three initiatives currently being developed to draw a more balanced picture address the issue on the basis of evidence from a specific rural area, the ancient ‘province of the Hare’ in Middle Egypt. The aim is to reconstruct the spatial network of ancient land- and waterways, landscape features, settlements and cemeteries, in the hope of generating a picture of population structure and settlement dynamics. This proposal concerns a part of this area bounded on the west by the Nile and on the east by the Eastern Desert. Which settlements were located here? How large were they, and how did they evolve? How did they relate to one another, but also to the cemeteries in the region? How do they relate to remaining evidence for the regional economic infrastructure, like stone quarries?