The time is right to focus on archaeological research in the Nile Valley in a truly interdisciplinary way, combining different methods and approaches. The DiverseNile project aims to create a ground-breaking data-based understanding of a specific ‘contact space’ in Nubia, moving away from the influence of current ideas of social and ethnic boundaries. The reconstruction of the landscape’s biography as a major integrated task introduces new possibilities to assess cultural diversity in marginal regions, such as the peripheries of urban sites or frontier regions.
We expect that the existing understanding of the categorisation of ‘Nubian’ or ‘Egyptian’ sites will be significantly revised by the project through its new concept of contact space biography, which capitalises on the dynamics of cultural encounters. We will explore cultural encounters through the distribution of sites and their duration, settlement infrastructure, building techniques, production activities and technologies, trade, diet, material culture, burial customs, religious practices and social structures. Therefore, DiverseNile will add important new insights to the growing debate of how to understand ‘Nubian’ and ‘Egyptian’. This will have an impact on the field of Egyptian and Nubian archaeology in general and ties in specifically with recent postcolonial approaches.
The results will also allow us to consider and discuss one region of the Middle Nile as a contact space inhabited by diverse social groups rather than as a static peripheral region, traditionally viewed from an Egyptian perspective and all the biases that entails. As a case study, DiverseNile will therefore illustrate the importance of bottom-up-approaches in archaeology and the need to consider alternatives to long-established narratives which are rooted in colonial biases towards ancient Sudan. Our research will contribute important data from non-elite contexts and illustrate the connectivity, complexity, and social diversity of lived experiences along the Nile in the presently unidentified marginal regions. We want to demonstrate the fundamental necessity of including social practices, communities, and the subsistence strategies of marginal regions in Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology, in order to understand the complexities of cultural processes and encounters in the Nile Valley.
