We have safely arrived at Ginis last Wednesday and it is time for a short update – because of an extremely slow connection here in the north, Rennan is kindly posting this from Khartoum where he is busy with our work in the museum. “We” is a very small team this season – due to the covid-19 pandemic and because it is a very short preparation season for our planned 2022 spring campaign. Our team comprises our inspector Huda Magzoub, our driver Saif and myself. Cajetan will join us in the next days.
I am mostly occupied with logistics at the site, getting much support by our friend Magzoub from Abri. On Sunday, construction work for our new excavation house in Ginis will start. This is all very exciting and will be a great achievement for the mission – can’t wait to see the final result of our new home.
Cajetan will conduct necessary measurements in preparation for the excavation work and drone arial photography. An update about these crucial working tasks will follow as soon as he joins us!
Besides the preparation work, Huda and I are conducting a foot survey at selected parts of my concession. In some cases, it remained unclear in our last seasons whether documented sites really represent ones previously documented by Andre Vila, or rather new sites. We carefully revisit these sites and could already solve the question in several cases. For now, we work in the area of Ginis on the east bank, but in the next days we will shift our focus to the west bank.
Furthermore, I spend the afternoons documenting finds from our previous season – there is plenty of pottery from our Kerma and New Kingdom sites in Ginis that keeps me busy. Such a joy, working again with objects!
Although this is just such a short season, I am very grateful that we made it – it has been already much too long and it is such a joy to see all of our Sudanese friends and colleagues again. However, our season is much more than just trying to continue with our work despite of the corona pandemic. In these difficult times in Sudan, I believe it is also a promising sign of a hopefully prosperous future.
The Christmas weekend is just about to end, and I am currently packing my last suitcase – despite of omicron & the pandemic, but of course with much caution and aware of the most recent political developments in Sudan, we are getting ready to fly to Khartoum tomorrow.
It will be a very brief season with a tiny team – just Rennan, Cajetan and I will travel. One focus of our planned work is on the study & documentation of object’s stored in the Sudan National Museum, coming from Vila’s survey in the 1970s in the present MUAFS concession. Rennan will focus in particular on ceramics and small finds from some of the New Kingdom tombs. Especially Ramesside material is highly interesting and raises many questions concerning the continuity of sites in the pre-Napatan era.
Up in the north, at our excavation house in Ginis East, I will focus on some logistics, preparing the upcoming excavation season planned for spring 2022. I also plan some survey work with our inspector and Cajetan will concentrate on setting survey points and taking measurements.
Of course, we will keep you updated – maybe not during the season, depending on the quality of the internet and connection.
Hoping that most of our plans will work out, but also very much prepared for surprises and the need to improvise, I am just really very happy to be soon back in Sudan, after almost 2 years!
We are very pleased to announce the DiverseNile Seminar Series for 2022. As a follow up of this year’s event, we will now focus on material culture and society in Bronze Age Nubia and respective perspectives from landscape and resource management.
It is my pleasure to open the Seminar Series on January 25 with an introduction and some ideas about global networks and local agents in the Middle Nile. Middle Nile contact space biographies we are currently reconstructing for the Attab to Ferka region provide a complex picture of a social space as a home to diverse groups and actors, rather than a static landscape and the periphery of centre-oriented narratives of New Kingdom Nubia. Our aim within the DiverseNile project is to decode, through our interdisciplinary studies, the economic role of the Attab to Ferka region for the principal centres, as a production area, and as land for animal husbandry and agriculture as well as for mining activities and gold production.
Rennan Lemos managed to gather a splendid group of speakers for the talks, covering a large set of topics from pottery technology to animal husbandry, gold extraction and much more.
We are looking much forward to this event and registration for the online DiverseNile Seminar Series 2022 is already open! Hoping to see many of you there – we will keep you updated about the specific schedule of the talks (always Tuesday, 1pm CET)!
I have thought a lot about style recently ‒ on the one hand about stylistic questions of Ptolemaic coffins for the Ankh-Hor project, as well as for class preparation about Egyptian art, but of course also during the processing of ceramics from Nubia, from the colonial town of Sai Island.
Style is in general a much-disputed label in archaeology and art history. Recent studies have introduced a focus on “style as effect” (Bussels and van Oostveldt 2020, 221 with references), stressing the transformative power of style and discussing style together with objects and agency. Stylistic variations as reflections of intercultural exchange seem to be very evident in the ceramic corpus from colonial Nubia during the New Kingdom.
It is well established that are clear differences regarding the Egyptian style and the Nubian style pottery corpora in colonial Nubia, not only in terms of shape but also regarding the technology with wheel-made Egyptian and hand-made Nubian vessels. From the beginning of my study of pottery from Sai Island, I used the term “Egyptian style” for wheel-made products and soon differentiated between locally produced variants and imported vessels.
But let’s come back to the broad concept of style – I believe the main aim should be to address the complex processes involved in producing objects (as proposed by Marian Feldman 2006 for the “International Style” of the Late Bronze Age). My labels for New Kingdom pottery in Nubia also stress the production process – vessels which appear within the Nubian respectively in the Egyptian tradition, without marking them already as Nubian or Egyptian production. Of interest is the effect and the role these objects took in the framework of cultural encounters – sometimes taking hybrid forms, making it impossible to separate the distinctive traditions from each other. Hybrid pottery products from colonial Nubia must be regarded as something new and separating Egyptian and Nubian elements on these pots is not helpful or applicable. Giulia D’Ercole is currently working within the DiverseNile project on these hybrid products and their significance for cultural encounters, focusing on the production technique including the raw materials.
Within New Kingdom Nubia, regional style in ceramics was mostly expressed by surface treatment and decoration (see already Miélle 2014). One exceptional case is that the colonial experiences on Sai resulted in a new style of painting wheel-made ceramics. Deep bowls are attested in all sectors of the town and find parallels in Askut. Stuart Tyson Smith interpreted the preference of wavy lines and painted triangles on these bowls as local Nubian style (Smith 2003, fig. 3.7). Laurianne Miellé concentrated on the pending triangles painted in black on red and which seemingly refer to earlier Nubian decoration patterns known from C-Group vessels and Kerma Moyen bowls (Miélle 2014, 387‒389, fig. 4). However, this is not simply an inspiration by means of motif but there was a striking transformation in the execution style – incised decoration was carried out as painted decoration. Here, the colouring scheme seems to have been influenced by the new black-on-red style which became fashionable in the early 18th Dynasty, both in Egypt and New Kingdom Nubia. The shapes are markedly different from any Nubian style vessels and typically Egyptian; the production technique is also Egyptian, but in local variants of Nile clays. All in all, this new style of painted vessels must be seen as the embodiment of colonial experiences, transforming different cultural traditions to something new with multiple affinities in both directions.
Typical New Kingdom pottery context from the colonial town of Sai (photo J. Budka, processing S. Neumann).
Just as one example, this mixed context of sherds from sector SAV1 West in the colonial town of Sai shows the multiple styles of pottery we typically encounter in this urban centre with a strong cultural diversity in its material culture. There are imported Marl clay vessels from Egypt, one of which is painted and could be labelled as „Levantine style“ (although an Egyptian product); there are two bichrome decorated Nile clay vessels which were maybe produced locally in Nubia, but are very similar in style to Marl clay vessels and Nile clay vessels known from Egypt (see Budka 2015); one example attests the wheel-made painted bowls which seem to express a very specific colonial Nubian style restricted to Nubia (but here the style of painting is less clearly inspired by Nubian incised decoration). And finally, there is an undecorated, wheel-made dish produced locally on Sai and the rim sherd of a Kerma Classique beaker, probably also manufactured locally (and not imported from the Third Cataract region).
Sai is clearly another case study for a distinctive “local variation within a generally shared repertoire of material culture” (Näser 2017, 566) commonly found in New Kingdom Nubia which originates from specific social practices (Lemos 2020). Within the DiverseNile project and with our contact space biography approach, also considering the concept of Objectscapes, I believe we can take the results from Sai further. One aspect I will be working on in the next weeks is whether the intriguing concept of “Communities of Style” (Feldman 2014) is applicable to questions about pottery production in colonial Nubia, first of all for Sai and its hinterland, the MUAFS concession area.
References:
Bussels and van Oostveldt 2020 = Stijn Bussels and Bram van Oostveldt, Egypt and/as style, in: Miguel John Versluys (ed.), Beyond Egyptomania: objects, style and agency, Berlin/Boston, 219–224.
Budka 2015 = Julia Budka, Bichrome Painted Nile Clay Vessels from Sai Island (Sudan), Bulletin de la céramique égyptienne 25, 331–341.
Feldman 2006 = Marian Feldman, Diplomacy by Design. Luxury Arts and an ‚International Style‘ in the Ancient Near East,1400-1200 BCE, Chicago.
Feldman 2014 = Marian Feldman, Communities of Style : Portable Luxury Arts, Identity, and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant, Chicago.
Lemos 2020 = Rennan Lemos, Material Culture and Colonization in Ancient Nubia: Evidence from the New Kingdom Cemeteries, in: Claire Smith (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, Cham, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_3307-1.
Miélle 2014 = Laurianne Miélle, Nubian traditions on the ceramics found in the pharaonic town on Sai Island, in: Julie R. Anderson and Derek A. Welsby (eds.), The Fourth Cataract and Beyond. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference for Nubian Studies, British Museum Publications on Egypt and Sudan 1, Leuven, 387–392.
Näser 2017 = Claudia Näser, Structures and realities of the Egyptian presence in Lower Nubia from the Middle Kingdom to the New Kingdom: The Egyptian cemetery S/SA at Aniba, in: Neal Spencer, Anna Stevens and Michaela Binder (eds.), Nubia in the New Kingdom. Lived experience, pharaonic control and indigenous traditions, British Museum Publications on Egypt and Sudan 3, Leuven, 557‒574.
Smith 2003 = Stuart Tyson Smith, Pots and politics: Ceramics from Askut and Egyptian colonialism during the Middle through New Kingdoms, in: Carol A. Redmount and Cathleen A. Keller (eds.), Egyptian Pottery. Proceedings of the 1990 Pottery Symposium at the University of California, University of California Publications in Egyptian Archaeology 8, Berkeley, 43–79.
In these difficult times, when all of our thoughts are with the Sudanese people, we are pleased to announce the upcoming Sudan Studies Research Conference 2022 to be held at LMU in Munich on June 25 2022. The event is co-organised by Sam Tipper, the Conference Director of this format of meetings first held in 2017 at Durham University, and a group of Postdocs of my DiverseNile project, Rennan Lemos, Giulia D’Ercole and Veronica Hinterhuber.
We invite paper proposals and posters from postgraduates, postdoctoral and other researchers working on subjects with a focus on Sudan (ancient and modern). The deadline for submitting abstracts (with c. 200 words) is 31 January 2022.
We are very much looking forward welcoming an international group of primarily young researchers working on Sudan here in Munich next year – the conference is organised as a hybrid event and online participation will also be possible.
Just one week ago, I closed the very successful 2021 season of the LMU Ankh-Hor project and finished my last tasks of the pottery study for the South Asasif Conservation Project. It has been 5 amazing and intriguing weeks in Luxor, and it was great to be back in the field, especially because it was the first time since the covid-19 crisis.
This week, the winter term at LMU has started and I am also busy preparing a short field trip to Sudan in November. In respect of teaching, I will continue to combine aspects of my current research in Egypt and Sudan with classes for both undergraduates and graduates. There are two personal highlights in my classes this winter term – one seminar focuses on the First Cataract area where I have been working since 1997 and here in particular on the role of the region as link between the Lower and Middle Nile. We will discuss cultural contacts over 5 millennia and complex two-ways of interactions which is very much in line with both my previous AcrossBorders project and the current DiverseNile project.
The second highlight is a seminar I will be co-teaching with Rennan Lemos. Under the title “Egyptian History: Colonial Narratives on Ancient Egypt” we will explore particular topics in the archaeology of colonialism in northeast Africa, with a special focus on Egypt and Nubia. Among others, we will discuss case studies like the question of power of colonial centres during the New Kingdom and the formation of „peripheries“ in colonised Nubia. Particular attention will be paid to the role of objects and material culture and how these shaped colonial interactions; but we will also discuss how the remnants of colonial discourses characterised earlier scholarship about ancient Egypt and Sudan.
The archaeological study of colonialism in the ancient past is a very broad field and for Egypt and Sudan, a large number of various objects and images can be discussed – both regarding their context in antiquity and their interpretation by modern scholars.
Both Rennan and me are very much looking forward to this seminar which will offer the students fresh insights from our ongoing research about cultural diversity in the Middle Nile and will provide us, without doubt, with much food for thought. We believe that the new method of contact space biography I introduced for DiverseNile will reveal an alternative narrative regarding colonial Nubia, stressing the importance of social practices, communities, and the subsistence strategies of marginal regions in Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology. Discussing these points with a group of students will undoubtedly be an enrichment.
Although it is still partly difficult to adapt from the splendid atmosphere of the Theban Westbank and from a dig schedule to Munich and Vienna and the daily routine in the office/home-office, this winter and our teaching term promise much input for all of us! Looking much forward to the feedback from our participants.
Amazing how time flies by! It seems as if we just started off the DiverseNile Seminar Series very recently, but we are now cordially inviting for our last event in the 2021 series (but we are working already on a new edition for 2022).
I am delighted that on Tuesday, Oct. 12, we have an expert in cultural heritage management and collaborative archaeology to present – these topics are highly relevant for all of our studies and there was much progress in recent years in Sudanese archaeology. Much has already changed, and much will change, especially in terms of community engagement.
Our presenter is Tomomi Fushiya who is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw. She received her PhD from Leiden University. Tomomi has worked in Amara West and Tombos and is now leading the collaborative initiative of the Polish mission at Old Dongola.
This mission is an active best practice example, and I am very much looking forward to the forthcoming presentation. Just a few weeks ago, a new book by Tomomi on this project was published, the first publication of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of Warsaw about collaborative archaeology. The book is highly recommended (Tomomi Fushiya, Old Dongola: Continuity and change from the Medieval period to the 21st century) and it is available online for free.
As usual, late registrations for our lecture of the DiverseNile Seminar Series are still possible via email. See you all on Tuesday via Zoom!
I am very happy that from yesterday onwards, Iulia Comşa has joined the ERC DiverseNile project as a new student assistant. She will complement Sawyer Neumann and together they will help us with post-fieldwork processing, image editing, digital drawings, scanning and other tasks.
Iulia is a BA student in Egyptology at LMU and joint our last course in practical fieldwork about which she also wrote a blog post earlier this year. She is much interested in field archaeology in Egypt and Sudan and makes a perfect addition to our team. During the practical class (which was held online due to the pandemic), Iulia turned out to be also a very talented cook baker – her “stratigraphy cake” was very impressive!
Stratigraphy cake by Iulia for our practical class in March 2021 (photo: Iulia Comşa)
Welcome to the team, we are all very much looking forward to our future collaboration!
Tomorrow will be another DiverseNile Seminar! We will now focus on the First Millennium BCE in Kush. I am delighted that Kathryn Howley is going to talk about an exciting topic, “Performance and Appearance: Manipulations of Egyptian Style and Ritual at Amun Temples in Napatan Nubia.”
I have known Kathryn since many years and because I am currently in Luxor (for the Ankh-Hor Project and the South Asasif Conservation Project), I especially remember our encounter in one of the international conferences about “Thebes in the First Millennium BCE” held back in 2012 in Luxor. We share common interests since also Kathryn is particularly interested in questions of materiality and intercultural interaction.
Since 2018, Kathryn is the Lila Acheson Wallace Assistant Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. I always enjoy discussing things with her and very much appreciate her stimulating application of theoretical frameworks drawn from both anthropology and art history on topics from Egypt and Sudan.
Kathryn is currently preparing her first book, The Royal Tombs of Nuri: interaction and material culture exchange between Kush and Egypt c. 650-580 BC – a study many of us are very much looking forward to. Her paper tomorrow will include ideas deriving from her current fieldwork project in Sudan at Taharqa’s temple at Sanam – without doubt much food for thought!
Do not miss Kathryn’s lecture tomorrow if you are interested in First Millennium BCE cultural diversity and interactions between Egypt and Sudan! As usual, late registration via email is still possible.
According to the cold and rainy weather here in Munich, summer has long past – fittingly, our short summer break of the DiverseNile Seminar is now officially over. It is my pleasure to announce the upcoming lecture on Tuesday, August 31: Michele Buzon will be talking about „Intersectional Identities and Bodies: Exploring Biological, Geographic, and Mortuary Diversity in the Ancient Nile Valley“.
Michele is bioarchaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University in Indiana, USA. I have the pleasure knowing her since many years, having met her both in Sudan and at conferences. She is the codirector of the important excavations at Tombos and we were therefore always in close contact during my AcrossBorders project. Our assessment of the strontium isotope analysis from Sai could nicely built on data published by her and co-authors. As I outlined in an earlier post, only common efforts will allow us to establish a strontium isoscape for New Kingdom Nubia and much work is still waiting for all of us.
Michele is one of the key figures in modern Nubian bioarchaeology conducting contextualized interpretations that combine skeletal evidence with settlement, environmental, and mortuary data. This approach allows to create a more nuanced picture of life and death in ancient Nubia (see also her recent summary of Bioarchaeology of Nubia in the Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, Buzon 2021).
I am very much looking forward to her presentation and hope that many of you will be joining us – without doubts, Michele is going to show exciting material, fresh data and will offer much food for thought! As usual, late registration for our DiverseNile seminar is still possible via email.
Reference
Buzon, Michele R. 2021. Bioarchaeology of Nubia, in: The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Nubia, edited by Geoff Emberling and Bruce Beyer Williams, Oxford, DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190496272.013.55
