Sarah Parcak’s team looks for ancient pottery by taking a core.
Calculating Failure
Pausing, Sarah Parcak looked across the lush, green landscape in Egypt. Te National Geographic archeologist opened her survey book to an ancient site she had seen in a photo taken from space. As she slowly made her way up a slight slope, her hiking boots leſt clear imprints in the soſt earth. As she walked, Parcak collected the shards of pottery she found, carefully mapping and photographing each one. When they reached the site, Parcak and her
team set up coring equipment. It let them take cores 10 centimeters wide and up to 7 meters deep. Each core is like a time capsule. Te deeper the core, the older the pottery in it. When the team examined pottery collected
from the surface and the cores, they expected it to date to 3,300 years ago. Tat’s when Amarna, Egypt’s ancient capital, flourished here. Yet the pottery had the wrong shape and color. It only dated back to 1,500 years ago. Parcak asked herself “why.” She needed to find out what had gone wrong!
Parcak thought that the cores were
deep enough to include pottery from 3,300 years ago. Tis was based on other people’s calculations that the Nile River, which ran near Amarna, deposited 1 meter of silt every 1,000 years or so. But these calculations were for the Nile’s wide delta—not near Amarna. Parcak realized that near Amarna, the river
is narrow and deposits five to 10 times more silt. Tat means more silt has built up near Amarna than in the delta. At Amarna, silt and pottery from 3,300 years ago is 20 meters below the current level of the surface. Tat’s much deeper than her coring equipment could reach. Parcak was disappointed that she didn’t
find pottery from 3,300 years ago. However, the new data helped her gain a better understanding of how and why the landscape in this part of Egypt changed long ago. As a result of good science, the failure became a success. Tis success helps Parcak and other archeologists study ancient Egypt.
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