• Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University
• PhD. Cambridge 1997
• Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class et cetera in New Kingdom Egypt. Blackwell,1999.
• Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt. Princeton University Press, 2002.

Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class et cetera in New Kingdom Egypt

• Subject of Volume is social relations at Deir el Medina (see below)

• Application of Social Theory to Egyptian Archaeology: a novel approach in Egyptology, a conservative field

• Focus is typically on architecture, texts, pictures

• Main disciplines are philology, art history, political history

• Individuality and difference are key concepts of the book

• Meskell claims to take a “Third Wave Feminist Approach”

• Structure of Book: the first two chapters set the theoretical scene, the following chapters demonstrate how to put the theory to practice with the example of Deir el Medina

1. Individuals, Selves and Bodies
2. Feminisms, Gender Trouble and Sexuality
3. Body and Soul in the Archaeology of Egypt
4. Mapping Age, Sex and Class at Deir el Medina
5. Accessing Individuals at Deir el Medina

Private Life in New Kingdom Egypt

• Structure of the book: "One useful way to approach the Egyptian material is according to its own coherent template: that of the human life cycle, which forms the structure of this book." (p. 1)

1. The interpretative framework
2. Locales and communities
3. Social Selves
4. Founding a house
5. Love, eroticism, and the sexual self
6. Embodied knowledge
7. Cycles of death and life

Deir el Medina

• c. 1500-1100 BC

• One of the best preserved sites of the New Kingdom (c. 1550-1070 BC)

• Our best evidence for a New Kingdom Settlement and its associated cemetaries.

• Consists of 68 well-preserved houses

• Surrounded by and enclosure wall. To keep people in or out?

• Surrounded by about 400 tombs ranging from the 18th Dynasty (c. 1550-1295 BC) to the Graeco-Roman period

• Workmen’s village for the craftsmen, artisans, builders, etc. who worked on the royal tombs in the adjacent Valley of the kings.

• “purpose built”

• Close affiliation with the State

• Provided slaves and servants for the individual families

• Meskell advocates that the State really had much less control than one would think, citing textual and iconographic references to stories of illicit affairs, stealing, murder, even robbing the very royal tombs on which they worked.

Issues

• The people of Deir el Medina were NOT common people
  • Close affiliation with the state
  • Prisoners?
  • Their daily lives may not represent the daily lives of an average person

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Viewdeir el medina (after Hikade).ppt