Bioarchaeology of Ancient Egypt. Schedule and Abstracts

Abstract

A student not only studies Egyptology, but is also inducted into a community of fellow students, faculty, and scholars. This community is expanded by attending meetings and participating in fieldwork. The budding scholar not only grows in knowledge, but is socialized into a scholarly culture with its own attitudes and perspectives. When a researcher who has spent a career working in another geographic area decides to enter the Egyptology community some might say “who is this person and what are they doing here?” I describe my personal adventures in Egypt and my interactions with the community of Egyptologists and Bioarchaeologists over the past 24 years. I point out how participation in meetings, fieldwork, and skeletal analyses has possibly shaped my views of this field differently from those who participated from the time they were students. I certainly had to learn how I conducted myself in my research. I discuss the separate research paths of mummy and skeletal studies, the overwhelming influence of the various dam projects, and the transformations of the “Egyptian Antiquities Service” over the past 150 years have all had on the development of bioarchaeology in Egypt. It appears to me that the future of bioarchaeology in Egypt has great promise with the development of new methods, such as ancient DNA analysis, in addition to the development of new theoretical perspectives, but it will continue to be hampered by the scarcity of comparative skeletal collections and the absence of uniform data recording. Read more...