‘A Place Full of Whispers’: Socializing the Quarry Landscape of the Wadi Hammamat

Abstract

The wealth of inscriptions at the Wadi Hammamat greywacke quarries (Egyptian Eastern Desert) have made it a key place to pursue enquiries about the social organization of expeditions to procure resources. Analysis of this textual material alone has, however, given us only a partial view of the social milieu that maintained quarrying from the fourth millennium bc to the fifth century ad. This article presents a fresh perspective on Egyptian quarrying that aims to balance the more accepted (and persistent) perceptions of overriding state control of these activities with viewpoints gained from recent archaeological survey of the Wadi Hammamat quarries. Practically and theoretically, a holistic approach is taken that contextualizes the textual sources and other elements of the archaeological record within the quarry landscape as a series of material complexes. Cross-cultural and comparative approaches to interpreting the data have enabled both reappraisal and augmentation of the ways in which we understand the social interplay between local and regional kin-groups within notions of state control of these activities. The article argues for the essential roles played by kinship ties and linkages to place, through the continual inscribing of names, as parts of the underlying human narrative that maintained quarrying here for generations.

Heritage Stone 6. Gneiss for the Pharaoh: Geology of the Third Millennium BCE Chephren's Quarries in Southern Egypt

“…Such features are good indications of the use of fire (Heldal and Storemyr 2014). Fire-setting technology has also been recently observed in the large-scale quarrying of greywacke in the Wadi Hammamat, in Egypt's Eastern Desert (Bloxam 2015).…”

“…These were made in the same way as vessel blanks, trimmed to a rough spherical shape. archaeological record (Bloxam and Heldal 2007;Bloxam 2015;Bevan and Bloxam 2015). Significantly, it is along the transport route out of Chephren's Quarries that most of the settlement and subsistence evidence is found.…”

Pottery Production in Egypt: the chaîne opératoire as a Heuristic Tool

“…Though used in archaeology, chaîne opératoire has not been widely used by Egyptologists, although Shaw (2012, 64) has recently introduced the concept to a general Egyptological audience and Bloxam (2015) has used it in the examination of Egyptian quarrying.…”

Cisterns, Wells and Use of Water in the Mining and Quarrying Sites of the Egyptian Eastern Desert

“…Ramps constructed from quarry waste, rather than paths, became a new aspect of the transformed landscape, these leading down from some quarries and working platforms where objects were semi-finished into rough outs. 56 The transport of the stone blocks consisted of three different stages:…”