For Wittenberg ASsistant Professor of History and archaeologist Dar Brooks Hedstrom, “X” may never actually mark the spot, but the excitement of getting close to it is beyond compare. Join Brooks Hedstrom and her fellow scholars as they journey to Sohag, Egypt, to uncover an ancient monastic world and bring international attention to one of the largest Christian settlements in the Middle East.

As a young child growing up in Jaffrey, N.H., Darlene Brooks Hedstrom or “Dar” as she prefers, reveled in Egyptian history and artifacts. Following word of a King Tut exhibit and the resulting “Egyptomania” that occurred, the budding archeologist soon found herself immersed in books on the topic, courtesy of local librarians who had learned of her interest in the subject.

By age 14, Dar participated in her first dig, thanks to an invitation from a team of archeologists studying an 1860s logging village in her home state. Her fascination with the field continued at Wheaton College, where she received her B.A. and M.A., and then at Miami University, where she earned her Ph.D. By the time of her dissertation, a little known saint, a monastery and a rarely visited region in Egypt had begun to monopolize her research pursuits, and today, the three have captured not only fellow archeologists’ attention, but also that of top-level research funding sources, the global community, and Dar’s students and colleagues at Wittenberg.

Currently the field director of the White Monastery Excavations in Sohag, Egypt, and the chief archaeologist for the Egyptian Delta Monastic Archaeological Project, Dar has spent the last 11 years studying monastic archeology in Egypt, and most recently St. Shenoute and the White Monastery where he trained more than 2,200 monks and 1,800 nuns from 385 A.D. until his death in 466 A.D. Located along the Nile in the predominantly Islamic Sohag region, the White Monastery and the church of St. Shenoute make up one of the largest sites for Christian antiquity in the Middle East.

“My interest in St. Shenoute stemmed from my work on monastic settlements in Egypt as a whole in which I continued to run into an assumption that monastic life in Egypt could be neatly divided into two categories: those who followed the example of St. Antony and lived alone or those who followed St. Pachomius and lived in communities,” Dar explains.

“My examination of the patterns of settlements in Egypt revealed that Egyptian monastics in fact adopted a variety of settlement patterns and that we needed to look at the examples first, then design categories based upon that material.
“St. Shenoute serves for me as an example of a truly Egyptian example of monastic living. He is not known outside of Egypt, as are the well known Antony and Pachomius. St. Shenoute was inspired by Pachomius, but established his own rules and order. His community was really a collection of several monastic communities, some with communal units, some with solitary dwellers, and some were male and female communities.

“St. Shenoute’s communities also outlived many other monastic settlements, which were abandoned in the 9th century,” Dar says, noting that St. Shenoute’s communities extended into the Middle Ages. “The story of those later periods is relatively unknown, and scholars even in the field of monastic studies tend to focus only on the early periods.”

As Dar dug deeper into the life and times of St. Shenoute, she discovered that archeological work in the area did not begin until the early 20th century.
“Sir William Flinders Petrie conducted the first archeological work in the area in 1907, yet most of the archeological material remained undisturbed until the Egyptian Antiquities Organization began clearing the area to the west of the church from 1985-1988,” Dar explains. “Work was later resumed by the Supreme Council of Antiquities in the late 1990s and continues today.”

Upon learning of this clearing, Dar and fellow scholars interested in the Coptic Church, the native Christian church of Egypt and Ethiopia, began to consider the state of preservation of Sohag’s monasteries, and together they formed the Consortium for the Research and Conservation in the Monasteries of the Sohag Region. Dar and colleagues Elizabeth Bolman and Peter Grossman have since received three grants totaling $27,500 from the Harvard University-affiliated Dumbarton Oaks Project Grant in Byzantine Studies to participate in a formal documentation of the existing structure of the White Monastery church and the exposed remains. Additional research using satellite imagery of the Sohag monasteries followed, which has resulted in promising information.

“During our two trips to the site in 2003, we were also able to document monastic residences, kitchen facilities, washing areas, large halls as well as pottery with Christian symbols,” Dar says.

Two years later, thanks to a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Dar and her consortium colleagues traveled once again to Sohag for two seasons of archeological work, the first of which began Nov. 14, 2005 through Dec. 18, 2005. The second season began in March 2006 and concluded in April.

“The proposed work at the White Monastery this time included on-site conservation of wall painting fragments, text excavation probes in areas previously excavated and several area surveys of the monastery lands,” Dar said.
The NEH grant also allowed two 2005 Wittenberg graduates to accompany Dar to the historic site. Tyler Jackson of Springfield, Ohio, and Corey McOsker of Loveland, Ohio, previously served as field archeologists at the 2004-05 Gammon House excavations in Springfield, part of an archeological field methods class sponsored by the university’s history department and co-directed by Dar and Thomas T. Taylor, professor of history.

“Tyler and Corey were remarkable in Egypt,” Dar says. “They hit the ground running, learning all about the structuring and arrangements that need to be completed before a dig can begin, and getting acclimated to working in sand. I had the utmost trust in them.”

In addition to living in the guesthouse on the premises with the entire 12-member archeological team, Jackson and McOsker conquered language barriers, conducted surveys and worked alongside the Egyptian staff members with ease.
“When Dar asked me to join her team, I was ecstatic,” Jackson said. “I thought this could be a chance of a lifetime. I didn’t know what to expect at all, but I learned that I can adjust to anything.”

Upon arrival in Sohag after an eight-hour bus trip from Cairo, the team spent the first two weeks assisting Tomasz Herbich, a Polish geophysicist who, through the use of magnetometry, produced some interesting readings of walls and a kiln for pottery- making. Days began by 6:30 a.m. in the field followed by lab work every evening. As part of the work, the team also completed a survey map of the area using the mapping software Pythagoras.

More Dirt on Dar A member of the Wittenberg faculty since 2001, Dar Brooks Hedstrom has received numerous awards and recognitions in her career, including admittance to the 2002 NEH Summer Institute for Eurasian History at Harvard University and the 2000 Erasmus Institute Summer Seminar in History through the University of Notre Dame. She also served as a fellow with the American Research Center in Egypt. An expert in the history of monasticism in Egypt from the 5th to the 12th centuries, she is currently working on projects on monastic spatial relationships to religious practice and an article on teaching pre-modern history. She and her colleagues’ archeological work in Sohag has received funding to date from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Dumbarton Oaks. Currently teaching courses in Pre-Modern World history and topical courses related to the history, religion and culture of the Eastern Mediterranean, Dar has also recently offered classes in Archaeology of the Near East, Modern Middle East, Herodotus and Asceticism. She has also directed two archeological digs in Springfield as part of an Archeological Field Methods course, one at the Gammon House and one at the newly restored Geiger House. She will travel to Egypt again in May to begin work at the sites of the first monastic communities in the Delta at the Wadi Natrun and at Kellia. She will then return to Sohag in December to complete the third season of archeological work at the White Monastery.

“This was a major accomplishment,” Dar says. “Now we’ll have a reliable map that can be easily updated and accessible online.”

Team members then engaged in small-scale excavation work at the site, working within 5-meter by 5-meter squares. An examination of shards of pottery, glass and wall fragments found in the squares, combined with a careful study of the mapping results during the excavation, confirmed that the White Monastery consisted of mud-brick walls with limestone flooring and painted walls. The team also learned that a large fire penetrated one of the ancient residences as a burn level was detected on a significant number of ceramic items.

“We are very happy with all the accomplishments during this season of work. We met our goals, and each area studied has provided us with concrete evidence that makes us want to go back and continue our research.”

Dar and her colleagues have already submitted a report to the inspector for the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo on their work in Sohag. A more extensive report to the same council followed, which was in both Arabic and English. The team then plans to submit a scholarly article on its work for publication this spring. Dar has also been asked to speak before the Supreme Council on the team’s research as well as to fellow colleagues at Wittenberg.

Yet, for Dar, bringing her research directly into her classes has proved most rewarding.

“I believe one of the greatest challenges in teaching is reaching students who are not naturally interested in your field of study. As such, I find that my archaeological work provides a way of illustrating my life as a historian of the Middle East to students in my general education classes who may have very traditional views of history as being just the recitation of facts. My hope is that by talking about my work and that of my colleagues in the field that students will start to realize that history is being written and rewritten daily by discoveries being made around the world.”