Descent Group Competition and Economic Strategies in Predynastic Egypt

The Egyptian Predynastic and State Formation

“…However, the continued dependence on typological analyses in the interpretation of intergroup dynamics in many of these debates elides wider contexts of the use and negotiation of material culture that might be revealing for the construction of social identities. Crucially, these will vary from site to site (e.g., Savage 1997;Stevenson 2008Stevenson , 2009a, with interactions in the Fayum likely to be different from those in the more northern Delta sites, such as at Kom el-Khilgan (Buchez and Midant-Reynes 2011). However the ''Naqada expansion'' is interpreted, it demonstrates that communities were becoming increasingly linked across regional scales, which in turn implies a reconfiguration of status categories and political alliances.…”

“…Nevertheless, different forms of social capital were still widely dispersed across society, as can be seen in the spread of diverse materials across cemeteries up and down the country. Thus, lapis lazuli is found in a cross section of burials at multiple sites (Hendrickx and Bavay 2002;Savage 1997), as are fine stone vessels produced in a great multitude of stones (Kopp 2007;Stevenson 2011, p. 69). Specialist craft goods such as ripple-flaked knives, while restricted in number, are represented in all regions and not necessarily in the wealthiest tombs (Midant-Reynes 1987).…”

Intra-site Spatial Analysis in Ethnoarchaeology

“…In relation to spatial aggregation, there is no doubt that spatial k-means clustering (Kintigh and Ammerman 1982) is one of the most popular techniques used by archaeologists in a wide range of intra-site case studies (Blankholm 1991, Savage 1997, Vaquero 1999, Alconini 2004, Lemke 2013 line (Ducke 2015: 366). An exploratory path to overcome the assumption of surface homogeneity (i.e., movement cost is uniform and symmetric in the whole study-area and it is a function of Euclidean distance between locations) has been recently proposed, modelling a new spatial distribution based on the pairwise cost-based distance matrix of the original observations, in order to represent them in a pseudo-Euclidean framework (Løland andHøst 2003, Negre 2015).…”

From refuse to rebirth: repositioning the pot burial in the Egyptian archaeological record

“…Such an approach endorses the role of literal and metaphorical ‘recycling’ of objects within cultures, in a manner that does not necessitate ‘devaluing’ as the object moves along its use-life, changing in function or meaning until its eventual accidental or deliberate entry into the archaeological record (Gosden & Marshall 1999). Certainly, studies of reuse and recycling as normative practice are emerging in Egyptian archaeological discourse: encompassing coffins and sarcophagi (Baines & Lacovara 2002; Manley & Dodson 2010), tombs and construction materials (Meskell 2001, 2002; Baines & Lacovara 2002; Ockinga 2007), domestic space (Hope et al 2010), royal sculpture (Wildung 2003), objects (Stevenson 2009) and stolen goods (Savage 1997). It appears, however, that aspersions are only cast towards reuse and recycling behaviour when the instigators or recipients are children or the ‘poor’.…”