Seminar ‘Conversations about Nomadism’
Wednesday 31 May 2023 at 2pm (Cairo time), IFAO
Session Title : Spatial organisation and (semi)nomadism
Clara Jeuthe & Anna-Katharina Rieger
In English
The first session of the Seminar ‘Conversations about nomadism’ will focus on the topic of ‘Spatial organisation and (semi)nomadism’ and will features two presentations by Clara Jeuthe & Anna-Katharina Rieger.
The seminar is open to all interested parties, both in person at the Ifao, subject to availability, and remotely on Zoom application upon registration -register here to receive the login link:
https://forms.gle/KuS4neist5sbKCks5
Abstracts
1. Where to cook and where to sleep. The Sheikh Muftah camps at Balat / Dakhla Oasis
Clara Jeuthe, DAIK
A large camp site of the local Sheikh Muftah group was investigated in the area of Balat, at the eastern edge of the Dakhla Oasis / Egypt. The site was only inhabited during a short time during the 3rd millennia, but had a rapid and intense development. The excavations revealed so far unique features in the context of this group as well as for the first time with a preserved stratigraphy within the individual camps. Thus, the results give us a glimpse into the everyday life of a camp and its spatial organisation.
2. Just follow the water – mobile people and mobile spaces in the Eastern Marmarica (NW-Egypt) between 1500 BCE and 700 CE
Anna-Katharina Rieger, Universität Graz
My input to the seminar will examine the mutual conditionality of mobile practices and spatial organisation in the semi-arid and arid region of the Eastern Marmarica on the northern fringe of the Libyan Desert. I will show what socio-economic life-strategies people in antiquity pursued depending on the scarce resources, how ‚mobile‘ their practices were, and how these life-strategies made the spaces ‚mobile‘, they lived in. The covered period will be mainly Graeco-Roman, however, traces of mobile people reach back to the 2nd millennium BCE and became invisible (for a while) around 700 CE.
Clara Jeuthe
Clara is a settlement archaeologist with a particular interest in oases and desert region in Egypt. Her focus is on the micro regional development and entanglement of different population groups in the Dakhla Oasis. As a senior researcher at the DAI Cairo, she is also deeply involved in material culture studies, especially tools and daily life objects.
Anna-Katharina Rieger
Trained as classical archaeologist (Munich, Bonn, Rome) with a topographical focus on the Eastern Mediterranean; research interest: Roman urbanism and religion, material and visual culture of Roman Italy and the Near East, material religion, space and religion, archaeology of arid regions, archaeology of mobility.
About the Seminar ‘Conversations about Nomadism’:
Within the framework of the “NOMADES” project (Nomads and Nomadism in the Eastern Sahara [Egypt, Sudan, Eastern Libya]), a recurrent seminar (three to four sessions per year) is being launched under the title ‘Conversations about Nomadism’ in order to create and animate a research network on nomadic societies and forms of nomadism in the Eastern Sahara.
NOMADES is a project funded by the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale and the seminar is organised by Marie Bourgeois, Julien Cooper and Maël Crépy.