Description
The excavations of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Marsa Matruh on Bates’s Island, which is located on the seacoast at the north of Egypt’s western desert, uncovered a small site with a metalworking workshop and nearby houses. The pottery found in the excavations indicates that this small Late Bronze Age settlement had links to several cultures: Cyprus, the Aegean, Egypt, the coast of western Asia, and the local Marmarican people. The results of the excavations are published in two volumes. This volume provides an overview of the excavations at the site, the Late Bronze Age and historical period occupations, and an introduction to the environmental morphology and history of the island.
Contents: The Setting (Donald White); Introduction to the Island’s Excavations (Donald White); Environmental Morphology and History of the Island and Adjacent Lagoon Area (Donald White and Rita Gardner); The Island’s Late Bronze Age Occupation (Donald White); Area VI: The Great Ridge, Bates’s Libyan Cemetery (Donald White and Linda Hulin); The Island’s Historical Period Occupation (Donald White).
Review by R.S. Merrillees in JARCE 41 (2004), pp. 200–202: “The report is a meticulous work of scholarship which enables the finds to be comprehensively reviewed and evaluted . . . His accomplishment is all the greater for having pulled together diverse contributions from several specialists and published the composite account of his excavations in a coherent, stylish and relatively prompt manner. . . . White and his team have rendered the history of the region and period an invaluable service by their careful and thorough report on the excavations at Marsa Matruh, which fill in a significant gap in the archaeological record . . .”
Hardback: 209 pp., 46 b/w figs, 4 plans, 47 b/w pls.
(Prehistory Monographs 1, INSTAP Academic Press, 2002)
ISBN-10: 1-931534-00-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-931534-00-0