EAMENA · Oxford / Leicester / Durham
What's destroying the archaeology of Egypt and the wider MENA region — and the open Oxford project that's been satellite-monitoring it since 2015.
EAMENA — Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa — was set up at the University of Oxford in January 2015, funded by Arcadia and the UK's Cultural Protection Fund. The project is jointly run with the Universities of Leicester and Durham.
Their method is unusual and worth understanding before you visit any site: they use repeat satellite passes (high-resolution optical imagery plus, increasingly, Sentinel-1 SAR radar) to detect change at thousands of archaeological sites — most of which have never been excavated or even formally surveyed. Every observation goes into an open spatial database built on the Getty Conservation Institute's ARCHES platform, with a structured record of the threats acting on each site.
For a traveller this matters in two practical ways. First, almost everything you'll see in Egypt is one entry in a much larger landscape that is being actively damaged — context EAMENA quantifies better than any single ministry report. Second, the project trains heritage professionals across the region to maintain their own Historic Environment Records, which is the only sustainable answer.
The Five Threats
EAMENA classifies every disturbance against this five-part scheme. Each card links to the project's own explainer.
Mechanised ploughing, irrigation canals, and the expansion of farmland into desert margins erase low-relief sites — tells, cemeteries, kiln fields — before they are ever recorded.
In Egypt
Acute in the Delta and the Faiyum, where rising water tables and intensive cultivation are dissolving mudbrick stratigraphy. EAMENA satellite passes have documented field encroachment around Tell el-Daba (Avaris) and across the eastern Delta.
Direct strikes, militarised earthworks, and the collapse of state heritage protection during war. EAMENA's near-real-time SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) work can detect structural change through cloud and darkness.
In Egypt
Egypt itself is comparatively stable, but the project's Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Gaza monitoring is the reference dataset for what unprotected sites look like after sustained conflict.
Roads, new cities, quarries, tourist infrastructure and informal urban sprawl. Often legal, often well-intentioned, almost always irreversible.
In Egypt
The Cairo ring road cut through Fustat-era cemeteries; the new capital and the Rod el-Farag axis have removed unrecorded surface scatter; quarrying continues to nibble at the Mokattam escarpment and the Eastern Desert wadis.
Subsistence and organised looting leave a distinctive satellite signature — clusters of small pits, spoil heaps, vehicle tracks — that EAMENA quantifies across the region.
In Egypt
Surged after 2011 across Middle Egypt (Abusir el-Meleq, Dahshur South, el-Hibeh) and remains the single biggest contributor to undocumented loss. Buying 'antiquities' from site touts directly feeds this market.
Rising groundwater, salt weathering, flash floods in wadis, coastal erosion and sand abrasion. Slower than a bulldozer but, at scale, more decisive.
In Egypt
Groundwater is the dominant threat at Karnak, Luxor Temple and the lower Theban necropolis; coastal erosion is taking the Alexandria seafront monuments; flash floods periodically scour the Valley of the Kings.
Use the Project
Open ARCHES-platform spatial database of recorded sites and their condition assessments. Free research user registration.
Free online course: using satellite imagery to identify and protect archaeological sites.
Site prospection, landscape archaeology, and heritage protection at intermediate level.
Peer-reviewed papers and project reports — the citable backbone behind every threat category.
Field notes, new methods (incl. Sentinel-1 SAR), and quick-turnaround case studies.
Worked examples of how the methodology has been applied across the MENA region.
What a visitor can actually do