In the Garden of the Pharaohs: Ancient Egyptian Craft Production Based on Organic Resources

Undergraduate

This seminar investigates in detail ancient Egyptian organic resources, related techniques, even proto-industries, through the scope of archaeological, historical, and socio-economic data, using material culture, iconographic data, and sometimes textual sources. Ethno-archaeological and experimental approaches of various chaîne-opératoire are discussed to illustrate and reconstruct skills, gestures, and craftsmanship expertise that have now completely disappeared. This course is organized according to various thematic modules within a diachronic approach, from the early 4th millennium BCE to the late Roman Period. We start our exploration with cereal agriculture (subsistence strategies, storage solutions, and food security), bread, beer, wine, oil production and economy, hunting and fishing techniques, animal husbandry, and food conserving. A second part of the semester is dedicated to the transformation of other products: papyrus and early paper production, basketry techniques, flax cultivation, linen production and other textile production, vegetal colorants, dyeingtechniques such as the Egyptian indigo. In the last part of the semester, we discuss local and imported woods, their use in vernacular constructions and monumental architecture, domestic and funerary contexts, nautical construction (small to large scale boat construction). SO T 1:30pm-3:25pm