The Lower Egyptian Culture: new perspectives through the lens of ceramic technology (original) (raw)
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Pottery Production in Egypt: the chaîne opératoire as a Heuristic Tool
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The main steps in the production of pottery are well known and are often similar across much of the world. However, the loci of production where such steps took place, namely the workshops/workspaces, have traditionally attracted less attention from Egyptologists than have the major religious and funerary monuments. In the past three decades or so, however, there has been an increased emphasis on settlement archaeology and ‘daily life’ and this shift has increased the importance of understanding production loci.This paper attempts to use the concept of the chaîne opératoire in association with spatial information in the way which Monteix (2016) has done in his study of Pompeian bakeries in an attempt to better understand the layout of workshops and to identify potential gaps in the archaeological record.
Investigating Dynastic Egyptian Pottery Making: Archaeological and Ethnographical Considerations
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This paper will consider the scale of pottery workshop production in ancient Egypt and Sudan through a comparison of ethnographic pottery studies, representations of ancient workshops, archaeological remains and the author’s own experiments with replicating ancient pottery. Despite many investigations throughout Egypt, with 10,000s of pottery sherds analysed at each site, surprisingly few pottery workshops have been uncovered. Most settlements would have required the services of at least one pottery workshop to provide the local populace with the containers needed to store, produce, cook, and brew beer and so on. Is the reason for this dearth of pottery production sites due to archaeological bias? Keywords:
2017
In the past the settlement pattern of middle Holocene Egypt was based on the presence or absence of material correlates including structures, stone tools, pottery, and domesticated plants and animals. Together these formed the traits of a Neolithic package that were thought to spread from southwest Asia to Egypt during the middle Holocene. Modern research now shows that the traits attributed to the Neolithic package did not develop uniformly over time and space, so the package concept is less useful. Contemporary approaches focus on processes such as mobility, occupation duration, and use-of-place to draw inferences about settlement pattern. These are measured through analysis of material culture such as stone artefacts and the placement of features on a landscape. However, more examples are required that use material culture types that are abundant and preserve well, such as pottery. Past research has focused on the analysis of a small proportion of pottery assemblages, typically whole vessels and decorated sherds, both used to form typologies and identify cultural groupings. Similarities in decorative styles or vessel forms are used to infer movement between different cultural groups. However, these culture-historical interpretations mean that large volumes of un-diagnostic sherds are often disregarded. This research uses non-destructive methods, such as x-ray fluorescence (XRF) and fragmentation ratios, to analyse all artefacts in pottery assemblages to understand the impact of the previously noted processes. XRF analysis is used to identify the geochemical signatures of the materials used in pottery manufacture. This analysis enables the identification of pottery that is not likely made locally and so provides a proxy for movement. The differential fragmentation of pottery is used in estimates of how many vessels the sherds in an assemblage represent and so provides a means for assessing occupation duration. Pottery from several places in Egypt that date to the middle Holocene are compared. Results suggest movement between locations beyond what was previously inferred based on culture-historical interpretations. These results are interpreted in the wider North African context.