Laurel Darcy Hackley

This project looks for ways to measure the relationship between cultural and environmental factors in the archaeology of desert landscapes. I focus on the Egyptian deserts, where millennia of human activity have created a subtle but dense palimpsest of archaeological evidence. Using a novel integration of remote sensing, environmental GIS analysis, archaeological survey data, and research questions focused on individual, embodied perception of landscape, I look for the ways that people in the past interacted with an arid but micro-climatically diverse environment. I am especially interested in the subtle archaeological signatures of water management and agriculture, which can show us the astonishing ability of people in the past to subsist in hyper-arid landscapes. This research shows the importance of cultural context on strategies of environmental adaptation, which are the result of individual decisions and change over time in response to social, political, and economic shifts. My work also explores different ways of interacting with the landscape as an archaeologist, ranging from traditional data collection to slow, creative rubrics of observation and documentation.