Contribution of the modern traveler's accounts (1750-1920) to the geoarchaeology of subsistence strategies and settlement patterns in the Egyptian deserts

International audienceEgypt is one of the most arid countries in the world with mean annual rainfall ranging from 200mm near the Mediterranean Sea to less than 2mm in the south. The onset of this aridity is dated from around 5000 or 4500 BP. However, even during this arid period, Egypt has been widely occupied along the Nile valley and in the surrounding deserts. Numerous archaeological sites have been excavated, dating from the emergence of the Egyptian central state to the twentieth century, and yielded impressive material and textual data, which has been thoroughly studied by Archaeologists, Papyrologists and Historians. Geoarchaeological study started recently in Egypt, during the 1980's and have been prejudiced by the Egyptian legislation (sample export ban) and the available analytical material which do not allow the use of most of the dating and sedimentological analyses generally applied. It is thus essential to develop new and innovative approaches to produce new results and to fill the gap between geoarchaeology and archaeology and get results despite the practical obstacles. Without the usual series of analyses applied in geaoarchaeology, one of the best ways to gather data is to combine geomorphologic surveys and spatial analysis with the study of travel accounts from the 18th to the beginning of the 20th centuries. This method allowed us to better understand the life conditions and the socio-environmental evolution in the Egyptian part of the Sahara and offers new perspective on the Holocene geoarchaeology of Egypt.Our communication aims to demonstrate that this method can contribute to one of the main challenges of geoarchaeology in Egypt: to better understand the settlement patterns, subsistence strategies and landscapes mobility since 5 000 BP in the Western desert and in the Eastern desert of Egypt. The first has known a continuous sedentary occupation in some oases linked with terrestrial trade routes and specialized commercial agriculture whereas the sedentary occupation of the latter has been more punctual in time and space and was mainly linked with mining and trading activity, or with harbours on the Red Sea. Nomad populations have also dwelled in these two deserts, probably during the whole period, and maybe since the beginning of the Holocene. The results included in this talk will relate mainly to water management, vegetation cover and sites distribution in the oases of Kharga basin in the Western desert (data from M. Crépy's Ph.D. Thesis) and in the Edfu-Berenice-Qena triangle in the Eastern desert (data from the ERC funded project "Desert Networks", dir. B.Redon)