A Symmetrical Archaeology Approach to Previously Excavated Sites: or, How I Learned to Appreciate Antiquarian Backdirt

ABSTRACT

Inspired by the author’s experience of working at Sanam Temple, a 1st millennium b.c. site in northern Sudan previously excavated at the beginning of the 20th century a.d., this paper attempts to reframe current archaeologists’ attitudes towards the backdirt of their predecessors. Using a symmetrical archaeology framework, it centers the concept of backdirt and analyzes it as a means by which different time periods and actors at the site influence each other, drawing them together into a network of relations. The strength of the relationship between these entities, facilitated through backdirt, produces surprising echoes and parallels across different historical periods, including between current and past archaeologists. Though backdirt is disdained, ignored, or rejected by different actors in the temple, it in fact repeatedly acts as a focus for creative engagement at the site and opens up new avenues of interpretation.

KEYWORDS:

• Nubia
• 1st millennium b.c.
• symmetrical archaeology
• symmetry
• antiquarian

Acknowledgments

The Sanam Temple Project has been funded with assistance from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; the Egypt Exploration Society; the Explorers Club Rolex Grant; and, the White-Levy Publication Grant. The author wishes to thank the Sudanese National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums for permission to conduct the fieldwork at Sanam Temple and especially inspectors el-Hassan Ahmed and Shadia Abdu Rabo for their expert facilitation. This paper was first submitted shortly before the devastating conflict in Sudan began in April 2023; it is dedicated to all of the project’s colleagues and friends in Khartoum, Karima, and Merawi, in the hope of a peaceful future.

Disclosure Statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 See e.g. Bonnet and Valbelle 2014 on mud brick architecture at Kerma and Bestock and Knoblauch 2015 for an example of dry stone huts.

2 We are currently waiting on optically stimulated luminescence dates from the mud bricks to try and determine a date for this secondary occupation.

3 “Most of the reproductions in the plates have been drawn by Mrs. Griffith from photographs, which are difficult to interpret without the originals; they are however the result of prolonged study. Not a few are taken from my rough notes made on the spot, there being no photographs by which to check them; though given with all reserve, they may have a certain value, as the originals are inaccessible and may have perished by now” (Griffith 1922, 92). Petrie, by contrast, talks with his characteristic bluntness of the importance of backfill in his treatise Methods and Aims in Archaeology (1904): “To uncover a monument, and leave it to perish by exposure or by plundering, to destroy thus what has lasted for thousands of years and might last for thousands to come, is a crime” (Petrie 1904, 178). Pioneers they may have been, and certainly more skilled in excavation than Griffith, but it is important to note that Petrie and Reisner are also open to critique on both methodological and ideological grounds, and that there has been extensive recent literature to this effect (e.g. Sheppard 2010; Challis 2013; Sparks 2013; Whitehouse 2013; Minor 2018; Brügger 2022; Der Manuelian 2022, esp. ch. 26).

4 I stress the notion of networks and relations throughout this paper, as it has particular relevance for the point I want to make about the connections between actors at different time periods; however, it should be noted that a recent “second wave” of symmetrical archaeological writing has pointed out that objects cannot be reduced to relations alone and continue to retain their own essence (Harris and Cipolla 2017, 187–188). Relations emerge from things, Olsen argues, not the other way around (Olsen 2010, 157).

5 Our own spoil heaps are used to backfill our trenches at the end of each season; though, as we use substantially similar excavation methods to Griffith in employing local workmen to help manually remove sand using buckets, we also often find that spoil heaps have the tendency to creep slowly closer to the trench as the excavators grow more tired.

6 The greater part of the Sanam archives consists of photographic prints and negatives, but they also contain an excavation diary with brief notes and sketches, as well as “tomb cards” which were used to record the contents and layout of each grave from the Sanam cemetery.

7 Griffith did not record any information about the fort beyond a couple of photographs of the temple, taken from a distance, before he started clearance of the colonial structure (Howley 2018b, 85, pl. 8). No traces of the fort have been found within the temple during the current excavations, but two Boxer-Henry rifle cartridge casings from the late 19th century a.d. were found in one trench to the southeast of the temple, which were most probably associated with the fort (Howley 2018b, 85, pl. 7). The lack of both archival and physical remains of the structure has precluded much interaction between this phase of the site’s history and our own work, but it is also true that, in general, archaeologists have not shown much interest in the material remains of the British colonial period (with the exception of Welsby [2011, 2013]), thanks to contemporary archaeology’s privileging of ancient remains over more modern subjects of investigation.

8 This is not intended in any way to be apologist for the racist or colonial aspects of Griffith’s work but to encourage an awareness of the whole lifespan of the temple instead of seeing certain moments within that lifespan as more important than others. Instead of a perhaps arrogant view of archaeologists and their archaeological activities as central to the temple, acknowledging other actors, including, of course, the temple itself, helps to contextualize our work as only one stage in the temple’s lifespan which is very particular to this time and place, rather than as an activity with inherent importance, in which we occupy a place of unquestionable moral superiority over Griffith.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Rolex Grant of the Explorers Club; the Egypt Exploration Society; the White-Levy Program for Archaeological Publications; and, the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.

Notes on contributors

Kathryn Howley

Kathryn Howley (Ph.D. 2015, Brown University) is the Lila Acheson Wallace Assistant Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She was previously the Budge Junior Research Fellow in Egyptology at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. She studies the art and archaeology of 1st millennium b.c. ancient Egypt and Sudan, and is particularly interested in the material culture of intercultural interaction and identity. Dr Howley directs fieldwork at the Amun temple of King Taharqo at Sanam in Sudan and is currently working on a new project on the use and reception of the body in ancient Egyptian art, in support of which she received the Beinecke Fellowship of the Clark Art Institute. ORCID: 0000-0001-9183-4366