The InBetween Blog

Holy Cow / Sheep / Goat!!

Notes on faunal deposits in Middle Nubian cemeteries

**Fig. 1:** A painted goat skull from SJE Site 47, now at the Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala University, Sweden (Photo: A. de Souza)

Following on from the shameless act of self-promotion that was the previous blog post, I thought I would keep the ball rolling and spend some time talking about the image on the cover of my book. It’s one of my favourite aspects of the Pan-Grave tradition, and it’s something that never fails to draw a few gasps, “oohs” and “aahs” from an audience.

Frontal bones and horns from the skulls of livestock animals – cattle, sheep, goat, and gazelle – are an unmistakable element of the Pan-Grave material tradition (fig. 1). The image on the book cover (fig. 2) is a photograph from the archives of the Scandinavian Joint Expedition (the SJE), now housed in the collection of the Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala University (Sweden). The photo, taken during the SJE’s excavation of the Pan-Grave cemetery SJE Site 47, shows at least seven goat skulls arranged in a row, facing the same direction, and placed in an arc-shaped trough with two upturned pots in front of them. This arcing arrangement is the most distinctive mode of deposition, but they can also occur in small groups inside a burial pit, or sometimes in groups of up to 60 individuals in discrete offering deposits.

**Fig. 2:** Cattle and goat skulls in an arc-shaped offering pit surrounding grave 51 at SJE Site 47. Two upturned Pan-Grave bowls are visible in the foreground. Image courtesy the Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala University.

You’ll also notice that the smaller skulls at the back of the row have dark spots and lines on them. That’s painted decoration, and it’s a defining feature of Pan-Grave animal skulls. The decoration usually comprises linear or spot motifs in black and red ochre, which on the white bone background is visually arresting in its graphic boldness. We were lucky enough to find a group of painted cattle skulls at Hierakonpolis in 2017, and I will never forget seeing a pair of painted eyes emerging from the sand, glaring menacingly at us, almost threateningly, after disturbing its almost 4000 years of rest.

No one knows exactly what the significance of these objects was, but we can make a few educated guesses. It’s very likely that the skulls relate to the Pan-Grave people’s pastoral lifestyle, and archaeozoologist Pernille Bangsgaard has observed that the skulls are often arranged as if they are a herd, with a large bull at the front, followed by cows, with the smaller sheep and goats bringing up the rear. Bangsgaard has also drawn a number of interesting ethnographic parallels with modern tribal and nomadic groups living in north and east Africa today. One is the ‘Mbanderu’ tribes from Namibia, in which the herd of cattle belonging to the head of a family is slaughtered and consumed by the family over an extended period after his death. At the end of the mourning period, the skulls of the cattle that have been slaughtered are arranged above the man’s grave… which sounds quite familiar, right?! In my many years of looking at SJE Site 47, which is the largest known Pan-Grave cemetery, I’ve noticed all of the graves with these large arc-shaped deposits of skulls are clustered together at the southern end of the cemetery, and they are generally among the larger burials. This might point toward a degree of stratification within Pan-Grave communities, and these larger graves surrounded by animal skulls may have been for a particular class of people.

**Fig. 3:** The famous painted bucranium from Mostagedda grave 3252 (adapted from Brunton 1937, pl. lxxvi.66).

The most famous example of Pan-Grave painted skulls from grave 3252 at Mostagedda (fig. 3). I say ‘grave’, but this example came from an offering deposit where it was just one of 40 sets of horns or frontal bones. This skull is remarkable because it is the only example to be decorated with a figurative depiction of a human, who, with his dark-skin, close-cropped hair and short kilt, is distinctly Nubian in appearance. The man carries an axe in one hand, which has led to the assumption that he is some kind of soldier; perhaps one of the Medjay with whom the Pan-Grave tradition is so often – and so problematically! – linked.

But even more remarkably, the man is accompanied by an inscription written in Egyptian hieroglyphs! Unfortunately the reading and translation of the word is unclear, but anyone interested should see the fascinating paper by my good friend, Julien Cooper and Hans Barnard (see references below). Despite the ambiguity of its meaning, the Mostagedda skull is a striking example of a hybrid object, in which Pan-Grave and Egyptian traditions have merged. The skull itself is a distinctly Pan-Grave object that has been treated and deposited in a wholly Pan-Grave manner, but the image applied to the object follows the canons of Egyptian art and incorporates Egyptian hieroglyphs. Regardless of whether we call this cultural mixing, hybridity, entanglement etc, the object is testament to the close relationship between Pan-Grave communities living in Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period.

You, too, can marvel at the enigmatic Mostagedda bucranium in the Nubian Galleries at the British Museum, London!

But, this is the InBetween Project, so what can these skulls tell us about the relationship(s) between the Pan-Grave, Kerma, and C-Group traditions?

**Fig. 4:** *Hundreds of cattle skulls surround a tumulus burial at Kerma (*www.kerma.ch/en/histoire/royaume-de-kerma)

The first point is that the burial of animal skulls, or even just parts of animal skulls, is not unique to the Pan-Grave tradition. Kerma burials are also famous for being surrounded by scores and sometimes even hundreds of cattle skulls (fig. 4). The differences are that these skulls are virtually always cattle skulls, usually with their horns intact, and – as far as we can tell – they were never decorated. The cattle skulls around Kerma burials invariably had their impressive horns intact, and these were placed pointing upward in circles surrounding the tumulus superstructures for maximum impact and intimidation.

Cattle skulls in Pan-Grave burials don’t always have horns, and sometimes it appears that the cattle have been polled, that is, that they had their horns removed at a young age before they could fuse to the skull. It’s just a guess, but maybe this has something to do with their pastoral nomadic lifestyle; removing the horns would have made it safer for the animals, but also safer for the people. These animals were the livelihood, so the last thing you need is them goring each other (or you!) with their big pointy horns! It seems that Kerma Nubians were also aware of the dangers posed by horns, but instead of cutting them off, they covered the tips with ivory or bone caps (fig. 5).

**Fig. 5:** *Ram skulls with inlaid ivory caps covering the tips of their horns. (Reisner 1914, fig. 19)*

The C-Group’s relationship with cattle is a little less obvious. Their graves do occasionally include cattle skulls, but far less frequently and in a far less dramatic fashion than their Pan-Grave and Kerma counterparts, and some have even suggested that the C-Group was influenced by Kerma in this regard. (Disclaimer: I generally avoid jumping to external influence as an explanation, and this time is no exception… but more on that another time!). Nevertheless, cows were clearly an important part of C-Group life to judge from the depictions of cattle on pottery and on the large sandstone stele that stood among their early cemeteries. One of the most famous examples, and arguably one of the most famous Nubian objects of all, is the so-called Chicago Cattle Bowl, discovered at the Cemetery K at Adindan in Lower Nubia, and now a star attraction of the Nubian collection at the Oriental Institute Museum in Chicago (fig. 6). The beauty of this object and the care with which it was made undoubtedly reflected the importance of cattle in the C-Group tradition.

**Fig. 6:** The Chicago Cattle Bowl
(oi.uchicago.edu/museum-exhibits/nubia/chicago-cattle-bowl)

So, the Middle Nubians loved cows, and some of them loves sheep and goats, too. These animals were an important aspect of their livelihood and possibly also their group identity. What differs is the way in which the different groups expressed the importance of these animals in their material culture and cultural practices. Some put their skulls around their graves, some put them in the graves. Some painted them, others didn’t. Some put them on pots, and sometimes on stelae. However it happens, cows (and sheep and goats) are always there, and it’s a factor that needs to be considered when exploring how the ancient Middle Nubians were connected with one another, and with the socio-cultural landscape of the region.

Selected references

Bangsgaard Jensen, P., Ritual Cows or just another Flock of Sheep? Faunal Deposit Practices at C-Group and Pan-Grave Cemeteries (PhD Dissertation: University of Copenhagen – Copenhagen, 2010).

Bangsgaard, P., “Pan-Grave faunal practices – Ritual deposits at five cemeteries in Lower Nubia”, Anthropozoologica 48:2 (2013), 287-97. (here)

Bangsgaard, P., “Nubian Faunal Practices – Exploring the C-Group “Pastoral Ideal” at Nine Cemeteries”, in J. Anderson, D. Welsby (eds.) The Fourth Cataract and Beyond. Proceeding of the 12th International Conference for Nubian Studies, (Leuven, 2014), 347-55. (here)

Chaix, L., Dubosson, J., Honegger, M., “Bucrania from the Eastern Cemetery at Kerma (Sudan) and the Practice of Cattle Horn Deformation”, in J. Kabaciński, M. Chłodnicki, M. Kobusiewicz (eds.) Prehistory of Northeastern Africa: New Ideas and Discoveries. Studies in African Archaeology, Vol. 11. (Heidelberg, 2016). (here)

Cooper, J., Barnard, H., “New insights on the Inscription on a Painted Pan-Grave Bucranium, Grave 3252 at Cemetery 3100/3200, Mostagedda (Middle Egypt), AAR 34 (2017), 363-76. (here)

New post. New Horizons.

OK. It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything to this blog. In fact, I haven’t posted anything since starting the project, and I feel terrible about it. Truth be told, I’ve started at least six or seven different posts, but then I get to a point where some serious self-sabotage kicks in and I somehow convince that nobody will be interested and let it slip by the wayside. But a heap of stuff has happened over the last few months that I think will be interesting, so I promise I’ll be posting more from now on!! I’ll also be sure to make some retrospective posts on my research trips to Sweden in the UK over the last few months!

Anyway, what better way to (re-)start than by introducing this:

That’s me, with a copy of my first monograph, which appeared in print this month!!

While I’m thrilled (and relieved!) that this thing is finally done, I am still too scared to look at it too closely, but I’ve been told by so many colleague that this is totally normal! So, if you find any errors, please, be a friend and don’t point them out to me!

The book is essentially an updated and revised version of my PhD dissertation, incorporating the critiques I received from my examiners, and subsequently through the peer-review process for the monograph itself.

In compiling the volume, I studied first-hand Pan-Grave pottery from sites from the Nile Delta to the Fourth Cataract, and eastward to the deserts of Egypt and northeastern Sudan. I recorded (and re-recorded) pottery now held in collections in Sweden, Italy, the UK, and USA, and there is also recently excavated material from Hierakonpolis, Tell Edfu, and Dendara that I studied in past field seasons. In all, there are well over 1000 individual vessels, and the gazetteer of sites that constitutes Chapter 4 of the volume includes in excess of 80 individual contexts. So, it’s a pretty comprehensive tome, I think!

There are lots of pictures, some in colour, and I even drew most of the illustrations myself!

You can download the Table of Contents here, and if you’d like to, you can order a copy directly from the publishers by clicking here. But while you wait for your copy to arrive in the post, here’s a brief overview of what you’ll find inside:

As the title suggests, the volume focuses on the Pan-Grave ceramic tradition, pottery being the most abundant and widespread, artefact type for the so-called Pan-Grave tradition. The pottery is most often found in Pan-Grave cemeteries, but it also often turns up in Egyptian towns, temples, and tombs. Despite how frequent it is, there isn’t yet any comprehensive source outlining how you might identify a pot or a sherd as being of the Pan-Grave tradition, and that’s where “New Horizons” comes in.

The book defines what Pan-Grave pottery looks like and, more importantly I try to establish a framework by which the pottery can be identified, described, and classified. One of the biggest problems in studying Pan-Grave pottery is the varied and contradictory nomenclature that has been used over the last century, so unifying the way that we talk about this material (or at least trying to!) will hopefully make it easier to identify and interpret.

So what is the title “New Horizons” all about? Well, you’ll find out in the concluding chapters, where a region-wide distribution makes it apparent that broad chronological, regional, and intra-cultural variation exists within the Pan-Grave ceramic tradition. In fact, it seems that the tradition as a whole is defined by variation rather than homogeneity, so much so that I’ve re-framed the tradition as the Pan-Grave Horizon, under which multiple sub-cultures or sub-traditions (plural) are located in different geographic regions at different times, each expressing their shared cultural heritage in a slightly different manner dependant on a number of impacting factors.

So, that’s the book! And now on to the next one! Before I go, a big a ‘thank you’ to Wolfram Grajetzki (Editor-in-Chief) and Gianluca Miniaci (Series Editor) at Golden House, who were the most supportive publishers you could ever ask for, and lovely people, too!

Next post… more details about the photo on the cover of “New Horizons”!

Welcome to InBetween!

Grüß Gott aus Wien!

A date with the basement at the Kunsthistorisches Museum

The InBetween project has now been running for about a month, and now that the seemingly endless string of bureaucratic tasks is completed (at least for this week!), I figured it was time to populate this blog with some information about the project, and what better way to start that with an overview of what the project is about!

For those of you who know me, it will come as no surprise that InBetween is all about Nubian archaeology. Of course ceramics are a big part of the project and the Pan-Grave culture is involved, but this time I am looking at all kinds of archaeological evidence from more than one Nubian culture.

At the core of the project are the three so-called Middle Nubian cultures – Pan-Grave, C-Group, and Kerma. These three groups were all identified and named about a century ago by different people at different places, their defining characteristics were laid out, and each was put into its own distinct cultural box. Since that time, the cultures have generally been treated as such – as distinct cultural entities – but in recent years archaeologists have started to realise that these three cultures share as many commonalities as they do differences. They no longer fit into the neat boxes that were constructed over a century ago. The time has come to unpack these cultural boxes and to rethink how these groups might be perceived, and that’s precisely what InBetween is all about.

On the surface, the three Middle Nubian groups are archaeologically quite distinct. I’ll introduce each of the three cultures in coming posts, but for now we’ll take a more general view.

Fig 1: Archetypal Middle Nubian pottery: Top L: stunning Classic Kerma beakers; Bottom L: a gorgeous late C-Group cup; R: one of the most perfect Pan-Grave bowls you will ever see. (All photos by the author, courtesy Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala University)

Starting with the most abundant evidence (and my favourite!), the ceramic productions of the each of the Middle Nubian groups look quite different as you can see above, but beyond this their burial styles differ widely, each seems to use a different subsistence strategy, and each seems to be mostly concentrated in fairly localised geographic regions, with some overlap. One of the key factors that led to these cultures being separated is that there seemed to be very little mixing between the groups, and each seemed to have kept largely to themselves, especially when it came to cemeteries. It had even been noted that, for example, Kerma material had never been found in a Pan-Grave context and vice-versa, and it was only in the later stages of these cultures that some inter-cultural blending seems to have occurred. Rarely was there any cultural mixing in death, and so in turn it was presumed that the same divisions applied in life.

A painted goat skull from a Pan-Grave burial at Debeiera East, Site SJE 47. Photo by the author, courtesy the Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala University.

Things have progressed considerably in the 100+ years since the Nubians were put into their cultural boxes. The commonalities between the three groups are becoming more and more apparent. Their pottery, though different, shares fundamental similarities — hand made black-top wares with incised geometric decoration and a predominance of bowl forms. In some cases it is almost impossible to distinguish one tradition from another. Although there are some differences in scale and complexity, their graves seem to follow a broadly similar pattern of circular pits with the bodies being placed in a contracted position with some kind of above-ground marker of varying complexity. Cattle and livestock held an important place in each tradition, so much so that cattle skulls were often included in graves either singularly or by the hundreds.

The assumption that Pan-Grave and Kerma material are not found together should also be corrected following recent discoveries. Kerma sherds are now known from a Pan-Grave cemetery at Hierakonpolis (I’ve seen them!!), and pottery from both traditions has been found together in graves at sites near the Fourth Cataract of the Nile (Emberling & Williams 2010). Pan-Grave activity can now be identified well beyond Lower Nubia, extending far to the south and out into the Eastern Desert regions, making contact and exchange with other cultures inevitable (Manzo 2017). Similarly, if we look at the beginnings of the C-Group and the Kerma traditions, the two groups appear virtually identical in terms of ceramic technologies and burial traditions. The only difference is the areas in which each cultures was identified — the C-Group in Lower Nubia, Kerma in Upper Nubia. In fact, it seems that the two groups share a common ancestor and that the differences that arose resulted from migration and varied engagements with different communities and environments.

The InBetween Project lives in these spaces in between the Middle Nubian cultures, because that, if anywhere, is where we will be able to get into the relationships between the groups. I use the word “relationships” here in the broadest sense––how the groups might be related via a common ancestor (like cultural siblings), and how they related to and engaged with one another in life. The Nubians did not leave us any texts to tell us about themselves, and texts written by the Egyptians are inherently one-sided and imbalanced given their ideologically negative attitude towards anyone who was not Egyptian. The only way we can get into those spaces between the groups is via the objects that the Middle Nubians made and used.

You’ll be glad to hear that there’s more than just pottery in the InBetween project! I’ll be looking at animal remains, jewellery, stone tools and objects, and even the graves themselves. I’ll look back in time to the cultures that came before the Middle Nubians––in some cases even as far back as Neolithic times, thousands of years before the Middle Nubians even existed, in order to dig out their roots. I’ll be doing fun things like RTI photography to closely study the technological processes used to produce these objects, and where possible I’ll also explore scientific methods like XRF and microscopy to analyse the raw materials. If there are common technologies and materials between the groups, then perhaps this might reflect corresponding ancestral relationships, cultural continuity, or technological exchanges.

As part of the trip I’ll also be making trips to Sweden, the United Kingdom, Egypt and (hopefully!) Sudan. Needless to say that there should be lots of experiences, anecdotes, and great visuals ahead!

So, stay tuned! I look forward to sharing the adventure and discoveries with you!

References:
Emberling, G. & Williams, B. 2010. “The Kingdom of Kush in the 4th Cataract I-III Report on the Sites of Hosh el-Guruf and El-Widay.” GAMAR 7: 17-38. (PDF)
Manzo, A. 2017. Eastern Sudan in its Setting. The archaeology of a region far from the Nile. Oxford: Archaeopress (PDF)