“We think of archaeology as a dead science,” said Canadian science writer Harry Thurston, “but in reality, people can learn from the past.” The most important lesson to extract from ancient cultures, according to Thurston, is how to manage limited resources. Modern society should learn from the mistakes of the people of ancient Egypt, where human activity led to diminished water supplies, soil degradation, and desertification.
For 30 years, Canadian-led archaeological research at the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt’s Great Western Desert, the driest region of the Sahara, has unearthed a treasure trove of artifacts and insights into 400,000 years of human history. Thurston spoke at the ROM on April 11 about his new book, Island of the Blessed: The Secrets of Egypt’s Everlasting Oasis, which chronicles the Dakhleh Oasis Project. In less than 30 years, digs at the oasis have yielded palaces, temples and mummies from the Golden Age of ancient Egypt, an archive of 10,000 papyri from the Roman era, and the world’s two oldest books. While a great number of relics in the popular Nile Valley have been destroyed, the isolated Dakhleh Oasis remained virtually untouched throughout the millennia.
Thurston, an outspoken conservationist, was particularly attracted to Dakhleh because research there addresses the impact of human activity on the environment. The oasis was first settled when nomadic people stayed in the area because of the constant supply of water and they began to keep cattle. Much later, the Romans introduced technology for extracting water from beneath the ground, believing they could expand the edges of the oasis. Exploitation of the environment allowed the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle, and hence the development of agriculture, architecture, art and writing.
But there were costs to these achievements. Herding caused the extinction of many native animals by creating competition for water supplies and pasture. Cooking fires destroyed the soil and excessive drainage of the Artesian wells led to a permanent loss of water supplies and subsequent desertification. The devastation of the Dakhleh Oasis is a microcosm of today’s global situation.
Island of the Blessed shows how people learned to manipulate the environment instead of depending on its favours. Thurston, however, often digresses from this main theme and focuses on the researchers at Dakhleh and their specific projects. While this can be tedious, it does show how findings from many areas of science such as medicine, botany, anthropology and physics can contribute to recreating history.
This 400-page book covers remarkable finds from 30 years of research, but the Dakhleh Oasis Project has really only just begun. Archaeologists, like the civilizations they study, always leave something behind for future generations to investigate.
