This is very much old news, but for anyone who has missed it previously, the Discovery Channel's website has provided some good coverage of the use of lead in sediments to identify different periods of occupation in Alexandria: "Traces of pollutant lead found in harbor sediments have revealed that Alexander the Great did not found the Egyptian city of Alexandria – he just rebranded it. One of antiquity’s most opulent economic and cultural centers, Alexandria is named after the Macedonian emperor Alexander the Great, who was believed to have ordered its construction on the western branch of the Nile River in 331 B.C. But new geochemical data, published by Alain Véron from the Paul Cézanne University in Aix-en-Provence, France, and colleagues in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters, revealed that this part of the Nile was settled 4,500 years ago, more than two millennia before Alexander's arrival."
This is a rather more coherent version than one or two of the previous articles that were produced when the results of the research were first announced - see the above page for details.
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