THE BLOG

This somewhat unconventional blog post will be presenting one of the major quandaries we have been thinking through lately—though we have returned to it time and again since the very first weeks of our project: how do you represent the complexity of the First Cataract socio-cultural and sociopolitical landscape on a map? In this post, …

Read more “Borderscape Blog 20: Representing Settlement Scale and Variability in our webGIS”

One of the key sites we worked during our Fall/Winter season in Aswan was the site of NH16, near the famous Nag el-Hamdulab rock art reliefs. Located at the top of the gebel, NH16 has a commanding view of the surrounding landscape. During the Naqada II-III period, the site was used as a cemetery by …

Read more “Borderscape Blog 19: Viewsheds from NH16”

Maria Gatto presented: Bordering Nubia: Egyptian border-making in the First Cataract region and its impact in Lower Nubia The process of state formation has been of paramount importance in the history of ancient Egypt. It led to the creation of the earliest form of territorial polity worldwide, defined by geopolitical borders of some sort. Ancient …

Read more “Borderscape Blog 18: Our Abstracts from our ICNS 2022 Talks”

After our blog’s summer hiatus, it is great to have the occasion to write about our wonderful experiences at the 15th International Conference for Nubian Studies in Warsaw. It was a really exceptionally well organized event, and a wonderful setting to reconnect with old friends. From thought-provoking keynote lectures to the fantastic banquet near the …

Read more “Borderscape Blog 17: The 15th International Conference for Nubian Studies in Warsaw”

Rather than blog this week, we would like to congratulate our colleague Dr. Jade Bageot and the TECHNOPREGYPT team for winning a fellowship through the POLONEZ BIS 1 funding program. The project investigates relationships between ceramic technology and socio-political development in Egypt during the 4th and early 3rd millennia BCE. The project will investigate Naqada …

Read more “Borderscape Blog 16: Congratulations to TECHNOPREGYPT, a New Related Project at IMOC PAS!”

This week, we will be discussing those boundary stelae established to mark inter-polity boundaries, building on last week’s discussion of those boundary stelae used to delineate fields or mark internal administrative boundaries. Previously, we concluded that often times the materiality and placement of these stelae were crucial as ways in which power could be dramatically …

Read more “Borderscape Blog 15: Boundary Stelae (Part II)”

In one of our first blogs (ages ago now, it seems), we talked about how boundaries must be maintained and shaped after they were created in order to remain effective—forgive the pun, but they must be “borderscaped”! We will begin talking about some of the ways this might occur in the coming weeks, but for …

Read more “Borderscape Blog 14: Boundary Stelae (Part I)”

It has been a couple of weeks since our last post, so rather than covering a specific topic, this blog will discuss our recent activities, our upcoming plans for the project, and set out an agenda for future blog posts! Last weekend, both Maria and I presented papers at the 73rd annual meeting of the …

Read more “Borderscape Blog 12: ARCE 2022, General Updates, and Plans for Upcoming Weeks”

At last, we have come to the concluding section of our three part series on Nile flooding! The first blog in this series discussed when the inundation occurred together with a brief discussion of how this impacted life in Pharaonic Egypt, while the following section examined nilometers, since they were used to recording the height …

Read more “Borderscape Blog 11: Visualizing Flood Data”