Sporadically, archaeologists have found assemblages of mixed plant, animal material, and stones, in ways that stand out from the regular pattern of town finds or burial equipment. The interpretation of unparalleled or rare deposits is always hazardous, but one option would be to consider these as materials used in healing practice. One unusual assortment of material was found at a tomb entrance in Waset (Winlock 1942, 206-209, on excavations for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Asasif Tomb 839). With two baskets, one nested inside the other, and coils of hard plant fiber, there were five pieces of aromatic wood and fragments of copper ore wrapped in cloth, as well as fruits and nuts. The perplexing mixture at least raises the possibility of use in strategies for health and well-being. The items might be burial equipment, cleared out at reuse of the tomb, or they might have been stored beside a tomb because they were being used there, perhaps for the living as much as for the dead. Any modern exclusion of death from life, and rigid line between living and dead, may not apply. This deposit may involve protection with matter to heal individuals in this world and for eternity (see also the following sections and in Chapter 7).
If these items could have been combined for healing rituals or medicinal effect, the next question would be, how many individuals in the society of that time had the skills and access to using them? Modern city dwellers may polarize the possible types of practitioner into two opposite figures: the doctor as a university-trained medic (primary example being the physician) and the folk healer outside modern medicine (in the European literature sometimes as medicine woman/man). For the second figure, general and archaeological writers have often used the term shaman - a social healer in contact with spirits, in north Asian nomad societies. As the word shaman comes from a particular cultural and linguistic background, anthropologists debate how far it can be used for other societies (Hutton 2001). The extreme polarization in general modern concepts of healers may not be useful for understanding the Bronze Age societies of the third to first millennia BC, historically and organizationally distinct from most societies studied in social anthropology and sociology. On the other hand, some of the most productive and insightful new readings of ancient Egyptian evidence have emerged from a conscious shift out of European medical thinking and into the worlds of spirit healers (DuQuesne 1991; Naydler 2004). Rather than applying the category of shaman healer directly to past Egyptian sources, I would keep the shaman in view as part of the attempt to understand how healers and healing operated within these distanced time-places. Written evidence for specialization in healing is considered in the second part of this chapter (section “Healer Titles and Roles”), but may relate mainly to the royal court and related wealthier social groups. The mixed material finds offer a less confined starting point for considering the healer in society.
World History
