One framework in which archaeology has been practiced in Egypt is that of culture history, which is reconstructed through the arrangement of the excavated material in a spatial and temporal context. This is basically a descriptive method to reconstruct the past in relation to a time sequence. Such archaeologists usually establish detailed chronologies, often composed of different periods with distinctive artifact styles for each phase.
With the development of processual archaeology in the 1960s, anthropologically trained archaeologists became interested in explaining social and economic changes in past cultures - the processes by which societies change - not just describing them. In processual archaeology, the natural, social, and political environments are often seen as significant factors in determining when and how changes occur. Economic factors, especially subsistence practices, technology, and demography, are also significant factors in sociocultural change. Archaeological evidence is interpreted within sociocultural systems - the institutions and organization of the ancient society as a whole. In theory, processual archaeologists are neo-evolutionists (“neo” differentiates them from evolutionists in 19th-century anthropology). They are interested in the process of socio-cultural and political evolution, from simple societies, such as the hunter-gatherers who lived in Egypt during Paleolithic times, to more complex ones, such as chiefdoms or the early state, which arose in Egypt during the fourth millennium Bc. Processual archaeologists not only investigate such developments in particular places, such as Egypt, but also draw analogies with similar forms of change in socio-political organization in other parts of the world, to help elucidate such processes in Egypt (and elsewhere) and to build general theories.
Beginning in the 1980s, increasing criticism of processual theory developed among post-processual archaeologists and processual archaeology was criticized as being too environmentally deterministic. Although many processualists did take ritual, ideology, religions, and agency (the role of individuals, i. e., “agents”) into account, the post-processualists believed that these and other aspects of human behavior, such as values and aesthetics, had been overlooked.
To better understand their data, archaeologists now use a number of theories, only a few of which are mentioned here. The role of royal agents in ancient Egypt is often evident in monuments and texts, which frequently contain historical data that were revised according to royal ideological agendas - the agency of power. But agency theory can be broader in scope: how did other individual agents operate in relation to the socio-political and physical environment of ancient Egypt? Some post-processualists are also interested in the archaeology of the mind and cognition: what is the meaning of the symbols on the artifacts and other evidence they excavate and what is the cultural grammar of this symbolism? Textual evidence, when available, can be especially relevant for such theory.
Post-processual landscape archaeology looks at the role of the ancient landscape, both natural and man-made, and the meaning of this - for the living and the dead. This is a particularly significant theoretical approach for understanding ancient Egyptian culture, since there are texts which give toponyms to natural features in the environment, such as mountains, and temples and cemeteries can often be understood within the context of the ceremonies that were performed there.
Lynn Meskell (Stanford University), who has studied evidence from the New Kingdom workmen’s village at Deir el-Medina, proposes that the study of ancient social life requires an understanding of individuals, their identities (especially gender roles), and their bodies (see 8.11 and Box 8-E). Such theory, however, also requires very detailed data, both textual and archaeological, which are rarely all found at archaeological sites. Most of the people who lived in ancient Egypt were peasant farmers, whose settlements - and lives - remain invisible archaeologically. More recently, identity and personhood in ancient Egypt has been examined by Willeke Wendrich, as has gender in this early civilization, by Terry Wilfong. Ethnicity, as identified in the archaeological record, is also an important theoretical topic. Stuart Tyson Smith’s studies of Egyptian and Nubian groups living together in Nubia in the New Kingdom are significant contributions to the broader topic (see 8.12).
World History
