Lunch Club provides affiliates of the Stanford Archaeology Center with a community-oriented forum for engagement with current issues in archaeology. On March 12, 2025,  we will host Dr.Laura Motta  from University of Michigan.

Abstract:

The site of Karanis, a Greco-Roman farming village in Egypt’s Fayum region, was extensively excavated by the University of Michigan between 1924 and 1935. Documenting the evolution of the site through a system of “levels” running from the Ptolemaic Period to Late Antiquity, the excavators left behind a dense archival record now housed at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology (Ann Arbor, Michigan). Also brought back to Ann Arbor was an immense quantity of material culture remains that provides critical insights into the daily life and economy of the settlement in the Roman period, including stores of crops exceptionally well preserved. Despite 100 years of research and long-standing scholarly tradition, much of these materials and records have yet to be systematically studied, contextualized and published. A new research effort is underway in the framework of the EoS funded AGROS Project: Agriculture, Diet and (mal)Nutrition in Greco-Roman Egypt.  Preliminary results have already challenged some long standing assumptions about the settlement decline in relation to the fall of the Roman Empire.  In particular, a series of radiocarbon dates, the first ever for a Greco-Roman settlement in Egypt, have overhauled the chronology of the site, showing  that Karanis was abandoned in the seventh century CE, much later than previously believed.