AERA Board Member Profile:
Matthew McCauley
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| Mark Lehner, left, with Matthew McCauley, AERA board member, on top of Khufu's pyramid. Behind them is Khafre's pyramid and beyond, Menkaure's pyramid and the desert. |
New Directions: Egypt
While music was Matthew's focus during his mid-teens, he also had a strong feeling that part of his life's mission involved discoveries in Egypt. After reading the work of psychic Edgar Cayce (who proposed that the "Hall of Records" of the lost civilization of Atlantis was located under the pyramids), Matthew got in touch with the Cayce Foundation concerning his own theories about pyramid geometry. Hugh Lynn, the psychic's son, telephoned and encouraged Matthew to go to Cairo and meet another young American interested in Cayce's work. At age 19 Matthew followed up on the advice and met Mark Lehner in Cairo in 1974 (see facing page). The two young men explored the Giza Plateau in search of Cayce's vision of history, but they quickly became disillusioned. Gradually their quest metamorphosed from metaphysics into rigorous science.
When Mark launched the Sphinx mapping program, sponsored by the American Research Center in Egypt, in 1979, Matthew traveled to Egypt as often as he could to help. He was in the field assisting when Mark laid down the center point for the grid which was eventually used for mapping the Great Sphinx, stone by stone. Behind the scenes, Matthew helped support the project through fund raising and with contributions of his own music money.
AERA
In 1985 Matthew and Mark founded Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA) to promote scientific archaeology at the pyramids of Giza. As a member of AERA's board, Matthew continues to help with fund-raising, moral support, and advice.
Matthew has always been interested in nondestructive remote sensing, technology which allows us to "see" into the past without excavation. Now that the current computation tools render this approach more powerful than ever, Matthew is especially eager to be a catalyst for new kinds of data collection and analysis.
Bread Ancient Style
Experimental archaeology offers clues to ancient baking technology
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| Mohamed Abdul-Qader sets the fire under the stacked bread molds. |
Inspired by a major discovery during the 1990-91 field season, Mark Lehner and a National Geographic team built a replica of a Pyramid Age bakery during the fall of1993 .With the assistance of Ed Wood, an expert on yeasts and sourdoughs, they tried their hand at baking bread following ancient Egyptian techniques.
The highlight of the 1990-91 field season was the discovery of two rooms, connected to a larger complex, which turned out to be the remains of baking facilities. Here bread had been baked in large, cumbersome, conical, ceramic molds, weighing up to 12 kilograms each, called bedja-- a style unique to Pharaonic Egypt. These two small rooms were far more significant than their modest contents, seen in the map to the right, suggested. The data they yielded, after painstaking excavation, helped flesh out some of the details of the baking process that was previously known only through reliefs from Old Kingdom tombs. However, to answer the many unresolved questions, Lehner and his team were compelled to turn to experimental archaeology, whereby ancient sites and processes are reconstructed to gain insight into how they really functioned. The National Geographic Society helped in this endeavor by sponsoring a project that rebuilt a bakery room, modeled after the ancient bakeries discovered in Area A, to test various theories about the baking process.
When the two baking rooms were first uncovered in Area A 7 at Giza in 1990-91, they seemed to be enigmatic rectangular structures, 5.25 x 2.5 meters, with low stone walls. As layers of black ash were carefully troweled away, features and artifacts, including whole and broken bedja, used to bake bread during the Old Kingdom, started to emerge. In the end, it became apparent that the rooms closely corresponded to the bread baking depictions in reliefs from Old Kingdom tombs such as that of the 5th dynasty official Ty at Saqqara.
In the northwest corner of each ancient bakery three large vats had been set into the ground, presumably, for mixing the dough. On the other side, in the southeast corner of both rooms, had stood open fireplaces, one of which still held an upside-down bedja, Old Kingdom tomb reliefs show bedja stacked with their interiors down, over an open fire in order to preheat them before bread baking. Along the eastern walls of both bakeries, two rows of depressions had been dug into the floor, like large egg cartons, presumably to serve as receptacles for the preheated bedja. Reliefs show workmen pouring batter into upright bedja whose rounded bottoms had been set into some sort of base. These same representations show that another bedja was placed upside-down over the filled bottom bread mold, as a cover. Then, hot ashes were probably piled around the two pots to complete the baking process, as suggested by the soil found in the "egg carton" area, which was black with minute particles of charcoal.
While the bakery rooms at Giza shed light on some details of this unusual method of baking bread shown in these tomb reliefs, many questions remained. For instance, why were the pots stacked heated prior to baking? Was this merely to temper them in order to prevent the bread from sticking to the pot, or did the pots' thick walls retain enough heat from the fire to serve as miniature ovens? Was ash indeed raked around the preheated pots after they were placed in the "egg cartons?" Was this really necessary to bake the bread? And, what kind of bread was ultimately produced from the emmer wheat and barley flours available to the ancient Egyptians? These grains contain very little gluten, the protein which gives modern breads their light, airy texture.
With these questions in mind, Mark Lehner and the National Geographic team reconstructed a bakery in the fields beneath the bluffs of Saqqara, faithfully reproducing the Giza bakery. Mark and Ed Wood, a retired pathologist, attempted to bake breads using emmer and barley flour, in pots made more or less to bedja specifications, and leavened with local, wild yeasts from Giza, captured by Ed, who has devoted much of his life to the study of wild yeasts and the sourdoughs made from them.
These experiments yielded many surprising insights, that would not have come about through arm-chair theorizing. For example, Mark and his colleagues discovered, as they mixed the dough and placed it in the pots, that the low walls of the ancient bakery rooms were not merely the eroded foundations of what had been taller structures. These walls were intended to be low and flat, providing essential working surfaces.They also found that higher walls would have trapped and held all the smoke and ash generated during baking, making the small space intolerable.
The results of these experiments are not only important for understanding the bakeries at Giza, but also have broader implications. Baking bread in bedja was a wide-spread practice, persisting for almost 500 years, as demonstrated by bread mold sherds found at campsites along the way to Palestine, as well as at sites from the Delta all the way down to Elephantine, in all kinds of contexts.