Everyday Life after Collapse: A Bioarchaeological Examination of Entheseal Change and Accidental Injury in Postcolonial Nubia (original) (raw)
Burial practice provides a critical arena for the negotiation of identities in colonial encounters through different acts of commemoration made by individuals. Ancient Egyptian burial practice in particular emphasized remembrances of ancestors through decorated tomb chapels and grave goods. Initially evoking Egyptian primordial ties, changes in burial practice at Tombos, an Egyptian colonial community in Sudanese Nubia founded in c. 1400 BC, eventually led to the emergence of a new, entangled identity incorporating both Egyptian and Nubian practices in the empire’s aftermath. By the Napatan period, c. 747–600 BC, the landscape in the cemetery was marked by a strong sense of multivocality through commemorations that emphasized different cultural memories, Egyptian and Nubian, stretching back far in time. This paper investigates the social and political dynamics of remembrance associated with monuments and burial practice. In order to accomplish this, we distinguish between practices that reflect shorter-term commemorations of individual lived experience vs. those that evoke longer term cultural memories. In a similar way, a consideration of inscribed vs. incorporated memorialization can help distinguish between conscious and unconscious remembrances reflected in the archaeological record. We suggest that like the distinction between inscribed and incorporated memory, commemorative practice and cultural memory at Tombos do not represent contrasting forms. Instead they indicate intersecting social fields that apply to varying degrees in different cases, reflecting choices conditioned by individual predispositions as well as larger social and political contexts.