Lecture :
Nomads of the Eastern Sahara: from footnotes to a full page
By: Marie Bourgeois, Julien Cooper & Maël Crépy
English with simultanious translation to arabic
As part of the second NOMADES research workshop to be held at the Ifao in Cairo from 12 to 14 May 2025. Marie Bourgeois, Julien Cooper & Maël Crépy, the principal investigators of the NOMADES programme will be giving a lecture on Wednesday 14 May at 2pm. The lecture will be in English with simultaneous translation into Arabic.
Abstract :
For nearly 9000 years, nomads have inhabited and exploited the Eastern Sahara, taking advantage of their mobility to build a multi-resource economy. First taking advantage of favorable conditions during the last millennia of the African Humid Period, they then adapted their practices and livelihoods to more arid environments. Their activities also profoundly transformed the desert, contributing to the formation of the landscapes we see today in Egypt and Sudan. Their contacts with the sedentary inhabitants of the Nile Valley, attested for almost 7,000 years, whether peaceful or conflictual, have been permanent. Yet they have remained largely confined to the footnotes of books and articles devoted to the history of the Eastern Sahara, even though their history, rich in itself, also sheds new light on the sedentary societies of the Nile Valley.
Marie Bourgeois is a PhD student in archaeology and Egyptology at the HiSoMA laboratory (Université Lumière Lyon 2). Her research focuses on the occupation of Nubia during the first half of the 3rd millennium (2900-2300 BC), using a transdisciplinary approach (archaeology, Egyptology and spatial analysis).
Julien Cooper is an archaeologist at Macquarie University, specializing in nomads and the history and archaeology of the Eastern Desert, in particular the Atbai deserts of Eastern Sudan. He leads an Australian Research Council project dedicated to this region, the Atbai Survey Project.
Maël Crépy is a CNRS researcher at HiSoMA (Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée, Lyon, France), after having been scientific member of the IFAO from 2021 to 2023. He is a specialist in socio-environmental interactions in arid and semi-arid environments during the recent Holocene, and is developing a geoarchaeology and geohistory program focusing on the links between climatic change, environmental modifications and the evolution of societies and human activities in the Eastern Sahara during Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Since the end of 2022, he has been head of the Mission Archéologique Française du Désert Oriental. He is also co-director of the Ifao NOMADES program and co-director of the Eaux et Sociétés research axis of the Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée since 2023.
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