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

在珍妮特理查兹博士的监督下，汤姆·兰德瓦特将在埃及的阿拜多斯遗址进行一个季节的挖掘，阿拜多斯是一个主要的邪教中心和墓地，已有3500多年的历史。公元前3000年至C。600 CE）。 这次发掘将记录希腊罗马时期（公元前323年至公元前323年）阿拜多斯的丧葬行为模式。300 CE），并将纳入一个更广泛的研究希腊罗马时期的埋葬做法借鉴材料从其他四个网站。 埃及的希腊-罗马时期在考古学上一直被低估，阿拜多斯的希腊-罗马时期的墓葬遗迹从未被适当挖掘和描述。 本研究首次尝试建立一个全面的、系统的希腊罗马时期丧葬行为的图景。对丧葬习俗的系统研究很重要，因为它提供了一种重建社会差异和身份的手段，因此为研究更广义的人类学社会变迁过程奠定了基础。 因为埋葬是死者的幸存者在一定的社会认可的行为范围内做出和执行的选择的结果，所以给定的埋葬待遇与死者和社会之间的关系是一致的。 通过观察大量墓葬中尸体处理、墓葬组合和空间组织等变量之间的关联模式，可以识别社会公认的区别和身份。 通过对丧葬模式的区域和历时变化的分析，本项目将探讨在复杂的城市社会中，社会身份和特征的表达以及身份的概念如何变化，并对非土著文化群体在政治上占主导地位的持续跨文化互动作出反应。 希腊罗马时期的埃及是这一现象的最好的例子之一：在这个时候，埃及是由一个小的，非土著精英统治，首先作为一个独立的政体，后来作为罗马帝国的一个省。 这项研究的结果不仅与埃及和地中海的研究有关，而且与古代和现代复杂的多文化国家和帝国的跨文化互动研究有关。 此外，国家一级的社会，特别是在地中海地区，往往被忽略的人类学讨论方面的太平间分析和其他：这项研究将把一个复杂而有价值的案例研究，即希腊罗马埃及，带入更广泛的人类学辩论，即跨文化互动最终如何影响社会进程，促进人类学对希腊化和罗马时期地中海国家的讨论。 这个挖掘季节的数据将作为Tom Landvatter论文的一部分发表在各种期刊上;它也将成为几个专业和公共讲座的主题。 这项工作也将为作者和几个研究生提供墓地挖掘和分析方面的培训。

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.