The Theban Desert Road Survey is an archaeological research project operated in conjunction with the Egyptian Ministry of Culture's Supreme Council for Antiquities that is being conducted in the Western Desert in Egypt that focuses on the ancient connections between Thebes and such settlements as the Kharga Oasis.
[1] The Theban Desert Road Survey has discovered sites from Predynastic Egypt, including substantial caches of pottery and other artifacts.
[1] The project was begun by Deborah Darnell and John Coleman Darnell, who started searching along caravan trails in the Western Desert west of Luxor in the early 1990s under an approach they described as desert road archaeology.
[4][1] In 2010, Zahi Hawass announced that the team had found a 218 acres (88 ha) site of a major residential and military center at Kharga Oasis at the end of the Girga Road dating back 3,500 years, the earliest known urban development in the Egyptian desert.
[1] At the site named Umm Mawagir (أم مواجير,"mother of bread molds" in Arabic), the Darnells discovered a substantial cache of bread molds, grinding stones and other baking implements, with a total of 1,000 lb of objects found, more than enough material to be "baking enough bread to feed an army" at a site with a population in the thousands during the period from 1650 BCE to 1550 BCE, a thousand years before any other known settlement in the area of the Kharga Oasis.