On Thursday, January 13, Frits Heinrich and Annette M. Hansen, from the Department of History, Social and Cultural Food Studies at the Free University of Brussels, will speak in the Whitney Auditorium (Room 1315, School of Education Building) at noon as part of the UMMAA Brown Bag Lecture Series.

Heinrich and Hansen will present some recent interdisciplinary advances in the study of ancient agriculture in Egypt and Sudan through the lens of palaeoethnobotany. They will discuss the rich tradition of the study of crop selection of the region, looking at changes from the mid-2nd millennium BC until the late Islamic period through a series of case studies from the authors’ own archaeological sites. They will also briefly reflect on some of the first results of biochemical analyses of ancient cereals and pulses from Roman Karanis.    

The Museum’s Brown Bag Lecture Series is free and open to the public.