OBJECTIVE 01
Recover & validate the archive
Reconcile core identities, retrieve missing matrices and dating files, and establish which records are genuinely analysis-ready.
Smithsonian / Egypt coastal lakes
From sediment archives to the histories of lakes and societies.
A collections-led project to recover the MEDIBA legacy and connect sedimentary and ecological archives with the history of societies around Egypt’s Mediterranean coastal lakes. From Holocene landscape development through Roman, medieval and Ottoman waterscapes to modern engineering, the project asks how changing lagoons shaped settlement and livelihoods, how societies reshaped water and land, and whether recent ecological change accelerated, through which mechanisms and with what differences among lakes.
Scientific opportunity. The MEDIBA programme assembled 87 Nile Delta borings and a large radiocarbon archive. Reconnecting those legacy collections with CASSARINA, MELMARINA and later records can turn historical collections into a new test of ecological change, historical human–environment interactions and resilience.
OBJECTIVE 02
Test ecological change
Quantify assemblage turnover and environmental trajectories only where chronology, sampling and preservation support rate inference.
OBJECTIVE 03
Connect waterscapes and societies
Test how hydrology and ecology shaped settlement and resources, and how historical water management and modern engineering altered lagoon trajectories.
What is assembled and what remains to be done
| Foundation assembled | Proposed development |
|---|---|
| MEDIBA catalogue, core locations and complete printed Table 2 radiocarbon transcription | Verify physical archive custody and strategically re-date/reanalyse preserved upper-core material |
| CASSARINA, MELMARINA and modern Burullus chronology/proxy audits | Recover complete ecological matrices, raw dating inputs and uncertainty-aware age models |
| 40-item acquisition register and nine-core analytical-readiness audit | Move records from published/figure-level evidence to reproducible machine-readable analysis |
| Nested temporal framework and frozen review protocol | Test rates, synchrony, lags and competing mechanisms without imposing a single 1964–1965 breakpoint |
Fellowship scientific core
Read documentCollections rationale, central questions, workflow and expected contribution.
01 · Evidence overview
A changing delta. An uneven record.
Acceleration is a hypothesis, not a starting assumption. Coverage, chronology, effective resolution and preservation determine what each archive can support.
3inventory lakes · two central cases
109master inventory records
87MEDIBA long cores
412MEDIBA dating-table entries
40acquisition items
Evidence at a glance
| Evidence stream | Manzala | Burullus | Mariut |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recent ecological archives | Published · matrices missing | Published · preservation gaps | Comparable record unverified |
| Recent chronology | Available · uneven support | Available · core dependent | Modern ecological dating gap |
| Holocene / historical context | Published | Published | Published |
| Reproducible ecological RoC | Not yet demonstrated | Not yet demonstrated | Not yet demonstrated |
What the synthesis supports. Major, spatially heterogeneous environmental reorganization. The available project material does not yet establish delta-wide synchronous ecological acceleration. Sedimentation, habitat area, geochemical trends and assemblage turnover require separate measures before comparison.
02 · Core explorer
Archive inventory and spatial context
Search all 109 master records, filter by lake, archive type or RoC utility, inspect the complete metadata for each record, and explore mapped core locations.
Present-day basemap; it does not reconstruct historical shorelines. Markers use coordinates supplied in the archive inventory; their precision depends on the source. Records without coordinates remain in the table.
ManzalaBurullusMariutOther/control
| Core / record | Lake | Type | RoC | Chronology | Priority action |
|---|
03 · Reviews & synthesis
From landscape inheritance to human–environment histories
The comprehensive protocol follows the revised fellowship framework: Holocene inheritance, reciprocal human–environment interactions during Roman and later periods, and uncertainty-aware tests of modern ecological change. Burullus and Manzala are central; Mariut is contingent.
Lagoons and societies influenced one another through changing connectivity, settlement, resource use and management. Historical relationships require independently dated, spatially compatible evidence. Direction of change is not equivalent to rate of change. Apparent abruptness can be produced by age-model uncertainty, uneven sampling, hiatuses, preservation and spatially variable sedimentation. The synthesis therefore asks whether rate estimates remain supported after effective sample spacing, chronology uncertainty and proxy-specific preservation are considered.
Holocene geomorphic inheritance, historical canal management and land use, modern hydrological regulation, drainage and pollution, habitat conversion, marine exchange and climatic forcing are treated as competing or interacting explanations. Temporal coincidence alone is insufficient: mechanisms require spatial and process consistency, plausible lag structure and evidence independent of the response variable where possible.
04 · Analysis framework
Match methods to the archive
Centimetre-scale slicing does not guarantee annual ecological resolution. Analyses are chosen from effective temporal support after chronology, sample spacing and preservation are accounted for.
Assemblage rate of change
Count-based dissimilarity and trajectory velocity from sufficiently complete ecological matrices with age uncertainty propagated.
GAM derivatives
Smooth change-rate estimates where sample density supports flexible trends; uncertainty and temporal aggregation tested explicitly.
Change points
Used only where effective n and chronological structure can distinguish an actual transition from sparse sampling or age-model artefact.
Provisional R-Ratepol rule. Rate metrics are used only after age uncertainty, effective sampling density and preservation are screened. Binning and smoothing parameters are sensitivity-tested rather than selected to maximize apparent peaks.
05 · Data recovery
The bottleneck is recoverable data
The living acquisition register contains 40 dataset components. It records exactly what is missing, why it matters, what analysis it unlocks, what fallback is allowed and what constraint cannot be violated.
| Item | Lake | Archive | Component | Status | Priority | What is needed |
|---|
Living acquisition workbook
Download workbookOriginal project workbook with dashboard, 40-item register, gap summary, study intake and source dictionary.
06 · Sources & audits
Open the evidence behind the atlas
The website now exposes the underlying master inventory, radiocarbon transcription, chronology anchors, archive audits, GIS index, nine-core tables and acquisition register as searchable datasets and direct downloads.
Historical evidence to recover. The current numerical registers principally document sedimentary and environmental archives. Roman, Late Antique, medieval/Islamic and Ottoman settlement, canal, harbour, land-use and documentary evidence require a separate source audit with dating, spatial precision and provenance. No completed historical dataset or historical causal result is claimed here. See the updated extraction and synthesis protocol.
Full data portal
Open data portalSearch, paginate and download every transferred dataset, including the 109-record master table and complete 412-row MEDIBA 14C transcription.
Audit note: the v3 transcription records 412 printed Table 2 determinations. The printed table totals 357 successful numeric/lower-bound determinations plus 55 “insufficient C” rows, which differs by one from the catalogue prose statement; both are retained rather than silently reconciled.