The Predynastic Cemetery N7000
During the late fourth and early third millennia BC the pristine state of Egypt arose from a group of independent, Neolithic agricultural villages. The traditional explanation of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt is that Narmer conquered the Delta. A diachronic model based on intergroup competition suggests that a gradual coalescence of polities occurred. Chiefdoms at Nagada, Thinis, and Hierakonpolis are hypothesized to have formed in the middle Predynastic and were then absorbed by the Hierakonpolis polity in the later fourth millennium. Later, the Upper Egyptian polity absorbed the Deltaic one. If such a model is accurate, it may be possible to identify intragroup competition at the level of a single polity (as well as interpolity competition). Here, a mortuary analysis of the large Predynastic cemetery at Naga-ed-Dêr indicates that several descent groups used the facility simultaneously. Grave inventories indicate that the different groups experienced economic trajectories consistent with a competition model. At various times in the use of the cemetery, different groups displayed greater amounts of wealth, and it was derived from different sources. In the earliest phase of the cemetery, trade was directed toward the south. In the second phase evidence of outside trade vanishes at about the time of the Chalcolithic collapse in the Southern Levant. In the third phase, trade rebounds, but now it is oriented toward Syria and Mesopotamia. The outside contacts appear to have been an important element in elites' gaining and justifying positions of power. The political unification of Egypt may be the result of the efforts of Upper Egyptian chieftains to control the lucrative trade routes with Southwest Asia; the creation of an Egyptian state may then be seen as an unintended consequence, in that it resulted not from the tenuous political unification forged putatively by Narmer, but from a series of actions throughout the first two dynasties to retain and extend economic, political, and ideological control of the Nile Valley.
The cemeteries at Naga-ed-Dêr (see the video) included several fields that contained graves from the Predynastic and later periods; the cemeteries are thought to be the burial grounds of people who lived on the west bank of the Nile at Girga, in the Thinnite Nome (a curious reversal of ancient Egyptina burial customs, which tended to place cemeteries on the west bank of the Nile). They were excavated in the late 1890s to the early 1900s; the Predynastic cemetery being dug mostly in 1905 and 1906. Its materials were curated mostly at the Hearst (then Lowie) Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. But little was done with them until Freidman studied the ceramics for her MA thesis, and Podzorski examined the human remains for her PhD dissertation.
Nothing was done to try to interpret the cemetery in light of its layout, construction, and material remains until my 1995 dissertation, which comprises the bulk of this web page. Individual chapters can be accessed under the major headings in the menu bar, but in some cases I've divided chapters into smaller blocks, listed as sub-menu items. In addition, I've created a MySQL database that includes all the materials from Volume II of my dissertation. In some places, I've added subsequent material that resulted from studies that I made after the dissertation was finalized and submitted, and I've incorporated some text and illustrations from published articles. For the most part, however, the page reflects work I did at the Hearst Museum and Arizona State University in 1993-1994. The dissertation holds up fairly well after more than 30 years, though there have been important discoveries from other sites in Upper and Lower Egypt since then. I find that my overall results still hold; I also find, reading the dissertation after more than 25 years, that it's more than a little bit long-winded, for which I appologize. And, sadly, the cemetery has been bulldozed and built over since 2009, so there is no going back. Of the "Big Splash" my committee predicted this would make, I detected barely a ripple. My fellow Anthropolgists largely ignored the work because it was Egypt. Egyptologists didn't like my coloring outside the lines (sort of like a badly colored picture of Sonoran Desert Saguaros on the Giza Plateau), since I wasn't, and am still not, an Egyptologist. So they, to, ignored it, or panned it, or tried to bury it. I raise the once-buried mummy for my own amusement.