Women as more than Mothers: Activity Level Analysis of Women in Predynastic Egypt and A-Group Nubia through Cross-sectional Geometric Analysis of Long Bone Loading Histories

Over the past several decades, post-processual archaeology has increasingly emphasized the importance of integrating analyses of material culture with the skeletal evidence of the people who produced and engaged with it, allowing for the reconstruction of lived experience, agency, and embodied practices. In that sense, skeletal remains are not simple static reflections of their environment but capture information on daily activity, social identity, and embeddedness within cultural and physical landscapes. Biomechanics is thus not simply a technique to quantify and study bone morphology, but can be used to better understand broader concepts such as embodied labor and inequality linked with status, age, or sex. Cross-sectional geometric (CSG) analysis of long bone loading histories has emerged as a central tool within this framework, enabling researchers to measure bone strength, rigidity, and shape as correlates of habitual loading and locomotor behavior. Combining such measurements...Show moreOver the past several decades, post-processual archaeology has increasingly emphasized the importance of integrating analyses of material culture with the skeletal evidence of the people who produced and engaged with it, allowing for the reconstruction of lived experience, agency, and embodied practices. In that sense, skeletal remains are not simple static reflections of their environment but capture information on daily activity, social identity, and embeddedness within cultural and physical landscapes. Biomechanics is thus not simply a technique to quantify and study bone morphology, but can be used to better understand broader concepts such as embodied labor and inequality linked with status, age, or sex. Cross-sectional geometric (CSG) analysis of long bone loading histories has emerged as a central tool within this framework, enabling researchers to measure bone strength, rigidity, and shape as correlates of habitual loading and locomotor behavior. Combining such measurements with the extrinsic and intrinsic bone remodeling factors specific to the cultural group, CSG can be used to bridge the gap between physical anthropology and archaeology by translating abstract notions of cultural behavior into quantifiable patterns visible within the skeletal remains. Despite the promise of this approach, its use in Nile Valley populations has remained limited, particularly for the Predynastic Period in Egypt and the contemporaneous A-Group of Nubia. Notwithstanding the crucial role these early civilizations play in understanding processes of state formation, increasing social complexity, and changing subsistence strategies, they have often been overshadowed in the academic debate by the strong emphasis on periods with monumental remains or written sources, or disregarded because of their supposed complexity linked to the excavation, conservation, and curation practices of the early twentieth century. This thesis seeks to address some of these gaps by the application of high-resolution 3D laser scanning for cross-sectional geometry of long bones from Predynastic Egypt (Tarkhan and Naqada) and A-Group Nubia (SJE sites 25, 95, 277, 401) through a gendered lens, investigating how differences in bone properties and morphology may reflect sex-based labor divisions and can provide insight into the everyday lives of women in the past. Key CSG parameters, including second moments of area (I) and the polar moment of area (J), are used to look at biomechanical adaptation of bones to habitual loading, providing a quantitative framework for the analysis of gender-specific activity patterns. By further comparison of observed patterns between the Predynastic Egyptians and A-Group Nubians, insight can be gained in culturally-specific realities of activity and by extension everyday lived experience in two distinct cultural groups inhabiting the Nile Valley toward the end of the fourth millennium BC. The research conducted here indicated overall complex patterns of bilateral asymmetry, gendered labor division, and habitual loading that varied between populations and long bones, reflecting potential differences in activity patterns, mobility, and gender roles between Predynastic Egypt and A-Group Nubian individuals. This thesis does not only illustrate the methodological value of 3D-based cross-sectional geometry for the study of past activity levels, exploring its limitations and possibilities in the study of fragmentary archaeological collections, but further demonstrates how highly technical studies such as CSG can be of great significance for future analyses of complex notions as gender and identity in the archaeological realm.Show less

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Women as more than Mothers: Activity Level Analysis of Women in Predynastic Egypt and A-Group Nubia through Cross-sectional Geometric Analysis of Long Bone Loading Histories