Dr. Karl Lorenz, right, with his family in Egypt.
Fulbright grant sends professor to Cairo for archaeological work
A Shippensburg University faculty member is in Cairo, doing research linked to one of Egyptology's great debates.
Dr. Karl Lorenz, professor of sociology and anthropology, will spend almost a year doing archaeological work in Cairo thanks to a Fulbright Scholars Grant he received.
Seven faculty members have received Fulbright grants during the last 11 years, according to Dr. Robert Stephens, director of international studies and associate professor of management and marketing. Stephens, the Fulbright representative on campus, said there are other faculty members who received Fulbright grants while working at other universities.
According to Lorenz, the nearly year-long project is the realization of a personal goal. "The thing that made me want to tackle the study in the first place is I'm an archaeologist and teach a class on Egypt," Lorenz said by phone from Cairo.
He's sharing the experience with his wife and teen-aged triplets. Lorenz's wife Kathleen Cain, a professor of developmental psychology at Gettysburg College is in Cairo on a Fulbright grant of her own, working on a project that involves Egyptian children.
It is a return trip for Lorenz who last year accompanied his wife to Cairo. Lorenz, who is on sabbatical from SU, said his research involves applying the same "pottery chronology study" he used during five years of research on Native American mound builders in the Southwest. "This is an opportunity to test archaeological methods that worked very well with the U.S. study."
Fine-grain pottery chronology involves looking at the kind of pottery found in various layers of the earth at different sites. By comparing sites, archaeologists can sometimes find similar styles of pottery in use at about the same time, which may show two cultures interacted during that time period.
"Each layer represents one point in time," Lorenz said, and is a snapshot of a culture at that time. Lorenz said a large amount of excavating has already been done in Egypt and what he hopes to do is to get researchers to share their data about what they have found. He wants to take that data and analyze it statistically, something he said hasn't been done before with the Egyptian excavations. "It's archaeological, but also a statistical study."
That statistical study will allow researchers to quantify how the pottery changed, looking not only at the presence of a certain type of pottery, but how much of a certain style is present. "If numbers go up around a region," he said, that indicates cultural interaction. By studying the pottery, researchers may be able to tell how closely they were interacting.
Lorenz said it could help settle the debate among Egyptologists over how ancient Egypt was first unified as a state more than 5,000 years ago. Some argue that the kings in Upper Egypt used military force over Lower Egypt, while others claim there was a peaceful adoption of Upper Egyptian culture by the Lower Egyptians.
With a military conquest, you would expect to see rapid adoption of the conquering culture's pottery style, Lorenz said. A slower adoption, a mixing of styles, would indicate a peaceful change.
He said the experience so far has been remarkable since he and his family arrived in Cairo Aug. 26. He described the people as "incredibly warm and friendly. We have had people in the street ask us if we're lost. We say 'no we think we know where we're going.' And they take us by the hand and take us there simply to help.'
Lorenz said it's been in the 70s in Cairo. "We never see rain or storms. I don't think we've gotten more than one-tenth of an inch of rain since we got here. On the majority of days you see no clouds, just pure blue sky."
He and his family recently took a trip to Luxor to see the temples and tombs. "It was truly, truly amazing to see the amount of workmanship, the amount of sheer labor that went into building those stone columns inside the temples."