To Make Holiday: A Preliminary Look at Alcohol Practices in Ancient Egypt via Use-Alteration Analysis

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Alcohols in the ancient world have been the subject of increased study as methods for analysis grow in sophistication, but despite progress made in the field of chemical identification, identifying the presence/absence of alcohols in the archaeological record remains somewhat mixed. I present preliminary work on the use-alteration patterns attributed to alcohols on the ceramic assemblage of Askut, a well-documented ancient Egyptian Middle Kingdom colonial fortress site, as a part of a larger study targeting alcohol production, transport, and consumption across the period of Egyptian occupation in Lower Nubia. To address issues of organic preservation, ceramic use-alteration analysis can be used to identify wear patterns in the form of pitting and spalling attrition that reflect the presence of alcohols in archaeological contexts. The assemblage from Askut, founded in the Middle Kingdom and occupied through the Third Intermediate Period, allows for the investigation of alcohol use in the context of colonialism, where alcohol likely played a lubricating role in the day-to-day dynamics of intercultural interactions. The sample presented in this research is a preliminary part of a larger study targeting chemical attrition activity on Egyptian and Nubian vessels addressing the question of entangled alcohol usage practices on the Egyptian colonial frontier.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52644