Event: Wednesday Talk: Social History of Food in Ancient Egypt: Between Humanities and Life Sciences

Abstract: Preservation of organic food remains from Ancient Egypt is an exceptional aspect of the archaeology in this region. The level of preservation of these materials has contributed to the early development of archaeobotany and radiocarbon dating. In this talk I will present unpublished food remains from the predynastic site cemetery of Nag ed Deir, and the New kingdom site of Deir el Ballas, in Upper Egypt. The materials were excavated in the early 1900s by George A. Reisner and Albert Lythgoe and are currently housed at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. I will discuss the results of interdisciplinary analyses applying archaeobotanical and isotopic methods to plant foods from these two sites to understand the social history of food in ancient Egypt and anthropogenic impact of climate changes on the foodways and social structures.

Bio: Amr Khalaf Shahat, is a postdoctoral researcher at Ancient Agriculture and paleoethnobotany lab, the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. He earned his PhD in Egyptian Archaeology and Paleoethnobotany from UCLA, and his Masters in Egyptology from the University of Memphis. He is interested in the study of Egyptian foodways through the analysis of plant remains from tombs and settlements and museum collections to answer questions related to cultural identities, and cross-cultural interaction.