Research

Ancient quarries and stone | Egyptian rock art | Weathering history

My research is closely related to the services I offer. It is usually undertaken within smaller and larger research projects. An interest in old stones and quarries evolved, unsurprisingly, when I started to work with weathering of old stone buildings, whereas rock art is a relatively new fascination of mine. But both are related to stone and environment, which is also the case for my work on weathering history.

See also my new projects

Ancient quarries and stone

Where do all the stones at monuments – and for utilitarian objects – come from? How were they extracted and transported? How was life in quarries thousands of years ago – or in the last century? Why did mankind sometimes go to extremes in extracting, transporting and handling stone? How is it possible to “read” an abandoned, old quarry landscape with its walls, extraction pits and half-finished artefacts, its settlements and huts, roads, ramps and harbours? How can such archaeological sites and landscapes be protected, managed and displayed to the public? These are the questions I have tried to answer, through long-time work with stone provenance and the archaeology of medieval quarries in Norway. However, most projects over the last 10 years have been in Egypt, where I have spent almost 20 field seasons in prehistoric, Pharaonic and Greco-Roman quarries (see publications).

A great deal of this work has been conducted within the EU-supported QuarryScapes project. I have also been involved in projects and visited or investigated quarries in several other countries.

At the moment (2010) I’m starting to write a popular scientific book about the 50 quarries that were used for Nidaros Cathedral (Norway), from the Middle Ages until today. Publication is expected in 2013.

• Key project: QuarryScapes
• Key publications: Ancient Egyptian Quarries – An Illustrated Overview (PDF 7,6 MB); Whatever Else Happened to the Ancient Egyptian Quarries? An Essay on Their Destiny in Modern Times (PDF 4,1 MB); Arkeologien til Nidarosdomens middelaldersteinbrudd (PDF 2,8 MB)

Egyptian rock art

Survey and mapping of Ancient Egyptian quarries implies long walks in beautiful desert landscapes – landscapes overloaded with known and unknown archaeological sites spanning almost the entire history of humankind. In an ancient quarry project, such sites must also be recorded, not least to understand the archaeological context.

Recording quarries in the Aswan area, we came across a whole new region of so-called “geometric rock art”. In such rock art the artists strongly focused on various geometric motifs; from simple lines and circles to very complex compositions. This kind of rock art is generally dating to between 7.000 and 4.000 BCE (the Epipalaeolitic and Neolithic periods) in Egypt. It is relatively uncommon in the country, as compared to the vast body of Predynastic rock art, made from 4.000 to 3.000 BCE. But it is occurring in many periods practically all across the world, implying that its meaning its extremely difficult to interpret. For Egypt, however, we know that it must have been made by very mobile peoples roaming across Upper Egypt and Lower Nubia. Very similar rock art is also found in Central Sahara.

After several seasons of recording the Aswan rock art, taking a landscape perspective, I have written a few papers about it and also taken up work on even older rock art; Late Palaeolithic drawings were only discovered in Egypt about 10 years ago and there are now three main locations known in the country. Together with the Supreme Council of Antiquities (Adel Kelany) I was involved in the discovery of one of these (Wadi Abu Subeira) and I work on others as a member of the Belgian Archaeological Mission to Egypt, headed by Dr. Dirk Huyge.

• Publications: A Prehistoric Geometric Rock Art Landscape by the First Nile Cataract (further information); Prehistoric geometric rock art at Gharb Aswan, Upper Egypt (abstract and further information); More “Lascaux along the Nile”? Possible Late Palaeolithic rock art in Wadi Abu Subeira, Upper Egypt (further information)
• Overview of Egyptian rock art: See Huyge in eScholarship UCLA.

Weathering history

Weathering history, in particular associated with rock varnish formation, is of key importance in attempts at dating rock art. I have only started to enter this field of research – my main occupation has thus far been weathering history at medieval stone buildings. Understanding weathering history implies reconstructing events and processes that have led to the weathering phenomena observed at a monument today. Such reconstruction is done with the aid of all kinds of relevant in-situ investigations as well as historical and environmental records.

The probably most well-known “weathering story” is that of the 3500 years old Cleopatra’s Needles by Erhard Winkler. These famous Egyptian obelisks were transported to London, New York and Paris around 1880. Whereas the London and Paris obelisks are in relatively good repair, their New York counterpart has suffered badly from weathering at the most exposed sides. Previously, people blamed the “toxic urban atmosphere” of New York for the damages, but in his contributions Winkler insisted that weathering was pre-programmed since the obelisk had been lying on the ground for a long period of time and also been affected by sea spray from the Mediterranean since it was relocated from Heliopolis to Alexandria in the Roman period. It thus had picked up salts that were activated when the obelisk arrived in the New York climate.

In all its details, the history is a lot more complex than this (see a blog post on this website), but Winkler should be acknowledged as one of the first who took up the historical implications of weathering phenomena at monuments. In particular, his work is a reminder for those who focus on air pollution, so widespread in our cities until recently, as a key weathering agent.

Inspired by Winkler, in my own work I have shown that poor or misguided restoration and former (or present) water infiltration has been a much bigger threat to urban Norwegian medieval monuments than air pollution. This has, of course, huge implications for the selection of conservation measures today. In general terms, former restoration and conservation, as well as indoor heating, has also been the greatest threat to most mural paintings I have investigated (most of which is reported, but not published).

• Publications: Weathering of Soapstone in a Historical Perspective (PDF 3,8 MB); Weathering of soapstone in a historical perspective (abstract and further information); Schäden erzählen Geschichte (PDF 1,5 MB); Fra “Luftangrep” til klimaendring: Forvitring på Nidarosdomen i historisk og politisk kontekst (3,7 MB)
• Winkler’s publications on the Cleopatra’s Needles: 1980, 1996, 1997