Neighborhood to National Network: Pyramid Settlements of Giza

Summary

A twenty hectare swath of Old Kingdom 4th Dynasty settlement that began with the building of the Pyramids at the low southeastern base of the Giza Plateau shows distinct components that must have functioned as neighborhoods in the sense of geographically localized social networks within the larger conurbation. Correlation between architectural patterns and builders’ graffiti with district signs suggests links to larger national networks. Flanking the major Nile port of its time, community members served in both ships crews and work gangs, linking them to broader interregional networks. Immigrants from source countries that specialized in procurement and transport of exotic products made for ethnic diversity in the distinct components of ‘downtown Egypt.’

It has been observed that as settlement size increases, social interactions per person increase in a predictable, ‘superlinear’ way, and that social clusters increase as networks with broader spatial ranges. That regardless of a city’s size, we all live in villages, may have been true for downtown Egypt at the pyramids.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Theorizing and Excavating Neighborhoods

Keywords

Spatial Coverage