Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Fashioning Sudan (Archaeology of Dress along the Middle Nile)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-09-01 bis 2025-02-28
100 years of archaeological research along the Middle Nile has yielded partial knowledge of the history of Sudan and Nubia. To date, the focus has been on the public life of the sedentary elite while other identities remain difficult to recognise and cultural frameworks often restricted to binary oppositions (e.g. sedentary vs. nomads, Pharaonic vs. African influences). Going beyond the monumental remains, Fashioning Sudan will focus directly on the people and on the way they chose to portray themselves to the world. Using garments as a privileged medium, the project will work on bringing more representative knowledge about the populations of ancient Sudan and highlight the entanglement of dress practices in the fabric of society. We will follow these dynamic processes over c. 4000 years of Kushite, Nubian, and Sudanese history, from the Bronze Age to the Medieval period (c. 2500 BCE to 1500 CE).
Fragile organic materials are exceptionally well preserved in the dry sands of Sudan and Nubia. Fashioning Sudan will focus on clothing items: as they resulted from long and complex manufacturing processes and went through multiple life cycles, often right next to people’s skin, these specific artefacts offer exceptionally broad and far-reaching information. The choice of raw materials indicates the available natural resources and economic performance, while technology informs us of craft techniques, production methods, and labour skills. The garments themselves belong to specific dress traditions and reflect body conception and social status, while their archaeological context of discovery (often funerary) points toward burial rites. Fashioning Sudan will lead a pioneering analysis of the immense yet often forgotten collections of textile and animal skin garments, uniting methods from the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. It will explore ancient Sudanese clothing and reveal how such diverse populations purposely selected resources, techniques, forms, and ornaments, weaving their own identities and embedding in their garments their relations to nature and the society.
Our main postulate is to recognise dress practices as a tangible and intimate gateway to past populations and their identities, as garments followed an individual from birth to death as a second skin. “Dress” includes all manner of body protection and ornamentation created by humankind: clothing, hairstyles, jewellery, tattoos, and scarification. When combined according to specific cultural codes, these elements form “dress practices” functioning as powerful means of non-verbal communication and “dressing” the body into an individual and social persona. Piecing together clothing assemblages and body perceptions through archaeological and historical sources, the team of Fashioning Sudan will retrace the development of dress practices from the Bronze Age to the medieval period (from c. 2500 BCE to 1500 CE) across the vast territory of modern Sudan and Nubia.
Fragile organic materials are exceptionally well preserved in the dry sands of Sudan and Nubia. Fashioning Sudan will focus on clothing items: as they resulted from long and complex manufacturing processes and went through multiple life cycles, often right next to people’s skin, these specific artefacts offer exceptionally broad and far-reaching information. The choice of raw materials indicates the available natural resources and economic performance, while technology informs us of craft techniques, production methods, and labour skills. The garments themselves belong to specific dress traditions and reflect body conception and social status, while their archaeological context of discovery (often funerary) points toward burial rites. Fashioning Sudan will lead a pioneering analysis of the immense yet often forgotten collections of textile and animal skin garments, uniting methods from the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. It will explore ancient Sudanese clothing and reveal how such diverse populations purposely selected resources, techniques, forms, and ornaments, weaving their own identities and embedding in their garments their relations to nature and the society.
Our main postulate is to recognise dress practices as a tangible and intimate gateway to past populations and their identities, as garments followed an individual from birth to death as a second skin. “Dress” includes all manner of body protection and ornamentation created by humankind: clothing, hairstyles, jewellery, tattoos, and scarification. When combined according to specific cultural codes, these elements form “dress practices” functioning as powerful means of non-verbal communication and “dressing” the body into an individual and social persona. Piecing together clothing assemblages and body perceptions through archaeological and historical sources, the team of Fashioning Sudan will retrace the development of dress practices from the Bronze Age to the medieval period (from c. 2500 BCE to 1500 CE) across the vast territory of modern Sudan and Nubia.
The project embraces three different ways in which humans experience ‘identity’: we craft and perform our own identities, while recognising the identities of others. Archaeological work consists of bridging these gaps between past and present, others and ourselves. Fashioning Sudan will structure research according to these three paradigms, into three Work Packages.
In Work Package 1 - Recognising identities: new paradigm for dress as identity marker – we aim to build the methodological backbone of the project. In the past two years, we have built our theoretical framework, encompassing archaeological theories about material culture, sensorial and body dimensions, and based on African concepts of dress, such as wrapping and knotting. Through collective readings, trainings, discussions, and workshops, we are formulating a new model to study dress practices and identities in the Sudanese context. This reflective exercise has fed the construction of the project database, which, for the first time, merges different sources for the documentation of garments: preserved archaeological specimens (animal skin, textiles, personal ornaments and accessories), detailed archaeological context information, and iconographic sources.
In Work Package 2 - Crafting identities: manufacturing dress in context – we aim to provide new and original knowledge about the natural resources and socio-economic dynamics of garment production. We have been able to carry out 11 study trips in museums and one excavation season, and added many artefacts previously studied in Sudan before the current war precluded any further travel in the country. In collaboration with these institutions, we have also sampled many objects and initiated a vast program of analyses: microscopy (transmitted light and scanning electron), palaeoproteomics, radiocarbon, and strontium isotopes. Thanks to this ongoing work, we are slowly reaching an unprecedented level of documentation on previously unstudied and unpublished artefacts. The results help us in reassessing the plant and animal species used to produce garments, the way the production was organized in the natural and settled environment, and the role of clothing in the changing socio-economic systems of ancient Sudan and Nubia.
In Work Package 3 - Performing identities: dressing the individual and social body – we would like to create a dynamic model articulating dress practices to diverse narratives of identity. From the data archived in our database and our numerous analyses, we are working in recognizing patterns in the use of garments: first, in their last phase of use (around the dead in graves), and second, during life (merging archaeological information and iconography). We are also selecting a list of case studies focusing on i) specific garments, e.g. the loincloth, and ii) specific individuals, e.g. a well preserved archer’s burial. This will lead to a detailed understanding of garments’ functions and answer the following questions: Who was wearing what? What did it mean? How did it change through time and space through ancient Sudanese history?
In Work Package 1 - Recognising identities: new paradigm for dress as identity marker – we aim to build the methodological backbone of the project. In the past two years, we have built our theoretical framework, encompassing archaeological theories about material culture, sensorial and body dimensions, and based on African concepts of dress, such as wrapping and knotting. Through collective readings, trainings, discussions, and workshops, we are formulating a new model to study dress practices and identities in the Sudanese context. This reflective exercise has fed the construction of the project database, which, for the first time, merges different sources for the documentation of garments: preserved archaeological specimens (animal skin, textiles, personal ornaments and accessories), detailed archaeological context information, and iconographic sources.
In Work Package 2 - Crafting identities: manufacturing dress in context – we aim to provide new and original knowledge about the natural resources and socio-economic dynamics of garment production. We have been able to carry out 11 study trips in museums and one excavation season, and added many artefacts previously studied in Sudan before the current war precluded any further travel in the country. In collaboration with these institutions, we have also sampled many objects and initiated a vast program of analyses: microscopy (transmitted light and scanning electron), palaeoproteomics, radiocarbon, and strontium isotopes. Thanks to this ongoing work, we are slowly reaching an unprecedented level of documentation on previously unstudied and unpublished artefacts. The results help us in reassessing the plant and animal species used to produce garments, the way the production was organized in the natural and settled environment, and the role of clothing in the changing socio-economic systems of ancient Sudan and Nubia.
In Work Package 3 - Performing identities: dressing the individual and social body – we would like to create a dynamic model articulating dress practices to diverse narratives of identity. From the data archived in our database and our numerous analyses, we are working in recognizing patterns in the use of garments: first, in their last phase of use (around the dead in graves), and second, during life (merging archaeological information and iconography). We are also selecting a list of case studies focusing on i) specific garments, e.g. the loincloth, and ii) specific individuals, e.g. a well preserved archer’s burial. This will lead to a detailed understanding of garments’ functions and answer the following questions: Who was wearing what? What did it mean? How did it change through time and space through ancient Sudanese history?
This ongoing work and related activities represent significant advances in research about cloth cultures and Sudanese archaeology. Two years into the project, we have managed to build the first multi-sources database structure for the documentation of dress practices, using new concepts and terminology better adapted to Sudanese realities. We have also studied more than 600 artefacts that were previously unpublished, and conducted a sampling and analytical campaign including +240 samples of textile, leather, and fur. This documentation forms the basis of the first multi-proxy analyses of animal fibres in the Nile Valley, encompassing a wide geo-historical area and combining biomolecular (palaeoproteomics) and morphometric (microscopy) analyses. It will constitute a true benchmark for further work on animal management in this part of the world. Among many efforts, we have tried to target areas or historical periods that previous studies did not cover well, such as the Fourth Cataract region or the A- and C-Groups periods, so we can reach – in terms – a holistic picture of dress practices in ancient Sudan, in all their diversity.