SUBALTERNEGY · Subalternity in Early Egypt (2700-2200 BC)

Egyptology has traditionally focused on the texts, monuments, and grandiose trappings of social inequality. A substantial body of archaeological evidence for low-status groups has accumulated but is marginalized in interpretations, so a holistic view of ancient Egyptian society remains obscure. SUBALTERNEGY inverts the elite bias in Egyptology, using fresh data and an innovative theoretical framework to explore how subaltern communities responded to hegemonic concepts that emerged during the earliest phase of political centralization in Northeast Africa (2700–2200 BC). The project develops methodologies to expose social organisation and cultural orientation of disempowered groups. The premise of the project is that people of all social groups strive for a meaningful life and, to this end, position themselves and are positioned in social relationships that are expressed in material culture and the built environment, which reflect, reproduce, and at times contest the prevailing social order. The aims are to:- produce a substantial record of contextualized data for a low-status ancient Egyptian community cemetery;- understand how burial practices transformed diverse lived experiences into local imagined communities;- uncover how human bodies, the landscape, material culture, and visual discourse were used to enact social relationships;- develop concepts of subalternity and relatedness into a novel bottom-up approach to ancient Egyptian society.SUBALTERNEGY uses multiple lines of evidence and adopts an interdisciplinary pool of methods from archaeology, anthropology, geophysics, visual studies, and cultural history. The project seeks to reveal agency and imaginative capacities within the wider population and to situate dominant ideologies within the complex realities of common life revealed by material culture. It contributes to current debates surrounding the history of social inequality and the unsustainable role of colonial archaeologies.