[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/whidden_archeology.jpg” caption=”2003 Whidden lecture “]Archeological sites from the Greek, Roman, Byzantine and early Arabic eras provide important clues to the past, but those sites have largely disappeared under sand and water.

Jean-Daniel Stanley, senior scientist and director of the Deltas-Global Change and Coastal Geoarcheology programs at Washington D.C.'s Smithsonian Institution (National Museum of Natural History), will be delivering the 2003 Whidden Lectures to help explain the human-induced and natural geological processes that are causing cities full of history to sink into the past.

For nearly four decades Stanley has studied Mediterranean deltas  sedimentary deposits that form at river mouths along marine and lucustrine coasts around the world  which have historically attracted humans because they provide the ideal place to grow agriculture and arrange transport and trade.

The lectures (free admission) take place Tuesday and Wednesday at 8 p.m. in Convocation Hall. Both lectures will focus mainly on Egypt's Nile delta, which is located in a relatively stable geologic area in the eastern Mediterranean while neighbouring archeologically-significant sites have already disappeared.

In Wednesday's lecture, called Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Nile Floods  Unraveling Ancient Alexandria's Catastrophes, Stanley will focus on the loss of once-important centers such as Alexandria's royal quarters. Historic documentation rarely records the cause of damage and disappearance of some sites that are now lying at considerable underwater depths, or partially buried under silt and sand. Stanley will discuss how the application of a number of disciplines including the earth sciences, physics and chemistry help solve some of history's and archeology's key problems.

During Thursday's lecture, Deltas  Their Natural and Human Legacies, Stanley will discuss how research on the world's delta's  which have a rapidly multiplying human population  is shifting. Now, researchers are learning to distinguish between the changes occurring due to natural processes such as climate change, and the changes that are a result of human habitation.

Stanley grew up in Strasbourg, France, and attended middle and high school in Rochester, New York. He completed his B.Sc. at Cornell University and M.Sc. in Geology at Brown University. He returned to France to study ancient deep marine canyons at the Ecole Nationale Supirieure du Pitrole. He has also worked in the oil industry in Texas and taught at Dalhousie University where research with students focused on modern submarine canyons of the Nova Scotian shelf.

The Whidden Lectures were established in 1954 by E.Carey Fox, a philanthropic alumnus of McMaster University, to honour a beloved chancellor, Rev. Howard P. Whidden, churchman, statesman and teacher, who had been the architect of the Universiy's transfer from Toronto to Hamilton in 1930. The first lecture in the annual series was delivered in 1956.

Photo caption: Photo of divers off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt. Courtesy of Franck Goddio.