Project title: TECHNOPREGYT Ceramic technology and the socio-political environment of Predynastic Egypt
Description of the project: TECHNOPREGYPT investigates modes of ceramic production in Predynastic Egypt (4th millennium BCE) with the aim of understanding how technological choices were affected by the process of state formation and, in doing so, move forward current scholarship on the process itself. Predynastic Egypt was characterised by the presence of three main cultural horizons distinguished by a different material culture, namely the Naqada, the Nubian, and the Lower Egyptian Cultures. Their mutual interaction gave birth to the Ancient Egyptian Civilisation but the dynamics that lead to the homogenization of the material culture and to the unification of the country are not yet clear. To track down the roots of these changes the technological approach will be applied which permits to investigate the social dimension of pottery production. The identification of the chaînes opératoires present in the Nile Valley will be carried out according to V. Roux’s classification system on four corpuses: that collected by the AKAP team (stored in Egypt), and those kept in the Egyptian Museum of Turin, and in the National Archaeological Museums of France and Krakow. This methodology will be complemented with thin section analysis and X-Rays microtomography, the latter necessary to analyse complete pots in a non-destructive way.