For the second time the PCMA Research Centre in Cairo and Institut français d’archéologie orientale have offered a joint post-doctoral fellowship. It has been awarded to Dr. Paweł Polkowski of the Archaeological Museum in Poznań.
His scholarly interests center around the rock art of North Africa, with a focus on the eastern Sahara region. For the past few years he has been working with the Polish team of the Petroglyph Unit of the Dakhleh Oasis Project, becoming the teams director in 2016. His work in Dakhleh involves rock art that dates from the middle Holocene Era (approximately 7000 BC), through ancient and medieval periods, to modern times. Such a wide chronological span necessitates an interdisciplinary approach, combining archaeology, egyptology and epigraphy.
As the Post-Doc Fellow, Dr. Polkowski will participate in the scholarly life of both institutes, he will also organize an international conference on rock art and graffiti in Egypt and Sudan. It has been scheduled for fall 2019 under the working title “Stone Canvas: Towards a Deeper Integration of Rock Art and Graffiti Studies in Egypt and Sudan”. He will also be responsible for the preparation of conference proceedings. The conference will offer a forum for a dialogue between representatives of different, if related, disciplines aimed at establishing common research perspectives. The workshops will gather specialists in rock art research, graffiti and inscriptions, focusing on historical periods, but prehistoric presentations will also be discussed.
The scholarship, which begins in March 2019, will last 16 months. Its first edition was organized in 2017, on the 80th anniversary of Polish-French archaeological cooperation in Egypt.