L'occupation humaine dans le Delta du Nil au 4ème millénaire. Archéologie et environnement. – Gezira

Deltaic environment is inherently hostile to humans (floods, lagoons, swamps, mosquitoes). It has long been believed the Nile Delta had not had any human occupation before Pharaonic times when a minimum of technology made it suitable for human habitation. However, the geological and archaeological research conducted during the past two decades have shown that the current conditions that form the Delta as we know it today were actually in place by the 6th millennium BC. Therefore it is possible tat human occupation and agrarian activity could have existed during prehistoric times. Situated at the crossroads of North Africa, Saharan Africa, the Mediterranean world and the Middle East, the region is the northern part of a country itself surrounded by deserts, which saw the birth of one of the first states in the world. The aim of this project is to study the interactions between people and their environment during phases of the formation of the Egyptian state. In an ecosystem that naturally fluctuates, what kind of occupation models are characteristic from the Early Neolithic to the Early Dynastic Period? What were the implications of the transformation on the landscape and the society? What were the traces left new forms of power emerging at the end of the millennium? And how did this situation impact on the management of the environment? The new geographical techniques, among which teledetection and geographical information systems, offer not only new possibilities for archaeological research, but allow researchers to supply answers to the crucial problems of the interactions between humans and the environment. The implementation of these research tools in a specific context and in response to a set of specific questions is designed to obtain a method of analysis, transposed to other places, from a region reference.