Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Identity, Burial Practices, and Social Change in Greco-Roman Egypt

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

Under the supervision of Dr. Janet Richards, Tom Landvatter will conduct a season of excavation at the site of Abydos, Egypt, a major cult center and cemetery for over 3500 years (c. 3000 BCE to c. 600 CE). This excavation will document patterns in mortuary behavior at Abydos during the Greco-Roman period (323 BCE to c. 300 CE), and will be incorporated into a broader study of Greco-Roman period burial practices drawing on material from four other sites. The Greco-Roman period in Egypt has traditionally been understudied archaeologically, and the mortuary remains of the Greco-Roman period at Abydos have never been properly excavated and described. This research represents the first attempt to build a comprehensive, systematic picture of Greco-Roman period mortuary behavior. The systematic study of burial practices is important because it provides a means of reconstructing social distinctions and identities, and hence a basis for the study of more generalized anthropological processes of social change. Because a burial is the result of choices made and performed by the survivors of the deceased within a certain set socially sanctioned behaviors, a given burial treatment is consistent with the relationship between the deceased and society. By observing the patterning of associations between variables such as body treatment, burial assemblage, and spatial organization across a large number of burials, it is possible to identify socially recognized distinctions and identities. Through an analysis of regional and diachronic variation in funerary patterns, this project will address how, in the context of a complex urban society, the expression of social identities and distinctions, and the very concept of identity change and react in response to sustained cross-cultural interaction, where a non-indigenous cultural group is politically dominant. Greco-Roman period Egypt is one of the best examples from antiquity of this phenomenon: at this time Egypt was ruled by a small, non-indigenous elite, first as an independent polity and later externally as a province of the Roman Empire. The results from this study will be relevant not only to the study of Egypt and the Mediterranean, but in general to studies of cross-cultural interaction in complex, multi-cultural states and empires both ancient and modern. In addition, state-level societies, particularly in the Mediterranean region, are often omitted from anthropological discussion with respect to mortuary analysis and otherwise: this research will bring a complex and valuable case study that is Greco-Roman Egypt into broader anthropological debates on how cross-cultural interaction ultimately affects social processes, facilitating anthropological discussion of the states of the Mediterranean of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The data from this excavation season will be published both as part of Tom Landvatter's dissertation and in various refereed journals; it will also be the subject of several professional and public lectures. This work will also provide both the author and several graduate students training in cemetery excavation and analysis.