A Quantitative Analysis of the Association between Pottery Motifs and Communal Identity during the Third Millennium BCE at Abu Fatma, Sudan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Hinterland communities are important arenas for understanding community-level cultural and social development at the periphery of state power. In such communities where writing is not present, symbols become important vehicles for the transmission of identity information. Ceramic motif preference among individuals within these communities is one such mode of symbolic communication. Kerma, the capital of the Kingdom of Kerma (ca. 2500–1500), was a major center of power in Nubia that held significant influence along the Nile valley during the second half of the third millennium BCE. Symbolic expression was central to communication practices in Kerma culture. Elaborate ceramic motifs linked to the earliest phases of Kerma suggest that symbolic patterns were integral to displaying group affiliation and conveying social information. At the Kerman hinterlands cemetery site of Abu Fatma (ca. 2500–1500), preference for specific ceramic motifs emphasizes elements of both communal identity and familial preference for distinctive design categories within a known symbolic system. Through the use of correspondence analysis, I argue that personalized preference within a broader symbolic landscape, deployed through ceramic motif patterning and chosen either by the family or the individual, was a factor in the distribution of ceramic designs across the Abu Fatma cemetery.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36253.0