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"Race and Archaeology: A Multipronged Approach" with Kevin Burrell, Debora Heard, Shomarka Keita, and Stuart Tyson Smith, with Vanessa Davies, on January 7th at 2-5pm Central.
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Interesting. I hope they touch on the Nile Valley, as well as aDNA.
-------------------- Note: I am not an "Egyptologist" as claimed by some still bitter, defeated, trolls creating fake profiles and posts elsewhere. Hapless losers, you still fail. My output of hard data debunking racist nonsense has actually INCREASED since you began.. Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
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posted
Is it going to be broadcasted on a social media platform?
Posts: 22234 | From: האם אינכם כילדי הכרית אלי בני ישראל | Registered: Nov 2010
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Pity I can't find a recorded video of this anywhere now that it's passed by.
It does seem to have focused on the Nile Valley though.
quote:Commonly asked questions of Egyptologists and Nubiologists center on the “race” of the people they study. However, the traditional anthropological “races” are not actually races, which refers to subspecies, they do not meet the criteria of evolutionary differentiation. Societally, “race” refers to groups that are constructed around physical traits and ancestry and these associations build a hierarchy that affects the lived realities of these people. The ancient Egyptions did not have an equivelant to the Western ideas of racial identity in their science or theory.
In this two-hour workshop, panelists will discuss how they use ancient source material to approach questions of “race” and variation. In this sense, we may adopt racialist methods of analysis, that is, using “race” in the modern sense to carry out research, although most biological anthropologists and geneticists reject the concept of doing racial analyses. A few key facts ground the discussion: (1) the ancient Nile River Valley cultures are indisputably African cultures with base populations that crystallized there; and (2) these ancient cultures did not have a conception of “race” or human variation that can be equated to modern Western conceptions.
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If they held these on Zoom they probably didn't record them.....
It would seem that the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Classical Studies, mostly focus on Greece and Rome from what I can tell. And in recent years there apparently has been some conflicts among various members about this focus on "Western" civilization over all others.
Many of the topics this year delve into similar things around politics, social issues and so forth in the history of archaeology. But not a lot about Egypt per se.
To prepare for the program, audience members should listen to this lecture HERE, given at Harvard in 2017 in advance.
Speakers: Donald Reid, Salima Ikram, Vanessa Davies, Fayza Haikal, Eve M. Troutt Powell, & Annissa Malvoisin
Info about the lecture:
Despite ideals of scientific and scholarly objectivity, both Egyptologists and non-specialists have often projected their own racial anxieties back into ancient Egypt. Recurrent attempts to prove that the ancient Egyptians were white or Black, for example, reveal more about modern societies than about ancient Egypt. The panel will discuss the history of how such debates have played out among modern Western and Egyptian scholars, artists, and writers, and how interpretations of ancient Egypt are intertwined with personal beliefs and prejudices.
-------------------- It's not my burden to disabuse the ignorant of their wrong opinions Posts: 2699 | From: New York | Registered: Jun 2015
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Despite ideals of scientific and scholarly objectivity, both Egyptologists and non-specialists have often projected their own racial anxieties back into ancient Egypt. Recurrent attempts to prove that the ancient Egyptians were white or Black, for example, reveal more about modern societies than about ancient Egypt. The panel will discuss the history of how such debates have played out among modern Western and Egyptian scholars, artists, and writers, and how interpretations of ancient Egypt are intertwined with personal beliefs and prejudices.
Sounds like the typical double talk we have seen before, where they deny the history of "race science" as a formalized, institutionalized and deliberate effort across multiple European countries and various scholarly fields to define and promote the concept of race over the last 400 years. Instead of that, they will talk about words as the problem as if "black" people or "white" people did not exist in ancient times, especially in Africa. Africans did not come up with this system and it is an insult to any serious scholar, especially African scholar to have these people tell you that using the word "black" is racist when it comes to an ancient African culture and civilization. So it will be a generic discussion where they totally avoid the actual core point and discuss everything else, such as semantics, the history of words and other tangent issues. And at the same time, slander African scholars as "equally racist" in "imposing" blackness on ancient African people or specifically imposing it on ancient populations in KMT, as if they were not Africans.
The core point that they should be getting to is whether or not the ancient populations of the Nile Valley before the 3rd Intermediate period would be considered biologically and phenotypically closer to other African populations or closer to Eurasian populations. That is the point in a nutshell, not some discussion about words and semantics about "race". They should get to the point. We know what the issue is and they don't want to discuss it because they know it would show they are pushing the same old nonsense. Either the people of the Nile Valley shared a common range of biological and phenotypic variations seen across other African populations as their "closest kin" or they shared a closer connection to Eurasians. And this goes all the way back to the prot-dynastic, predynastic and dynastic eras. They need to explain why they feel that the Egyptian Nile Valley would better be characterized as one or the other at any specific point in time. We all know that the African scholars have been saying all along that the closest kin to these people over those time periods were the other African populations on the Nile, ie black people. But we also know that the position of Egyptology since the beginning is that they were closer to Eurasians, ie white people (or very light skinned people) than Africans and that is the fundamental issue and disagreement.
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quote:Sounds like the typical double talk we have seen before
Yup...
-------------------- It's not my burden to disabuse the ignorant of their wrong opinions Posts: 2699 | From: New York | Registered: Jun 2015
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quote:Sounds like the typical double talk we have seen before
Yup...
Of course they have a single African diaspora scholar and she is going to tell us how African history starts in "Nubia" about 4,000 years ago. And we should be just so proud and happy to have these "racist" institutions acknowledge that African history is only 4,000 years old or so.... That seems to be the pattern these days.
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posted
De Souza just dismantled that Nubia/Egypt bifurcation... it's pure myth
-------------------- It's not my burden to disabuse the ignorant of their wrong opinions Posts: 2699 | From: New York | Registered: Jun 2015
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The bigger issue is that the Nile Valley and the Nile River are part of a continuous history going back tens of thousands of years. Separating that history up by breaking it up into pieces is the problem. Breaking it up into arbitrary chunks and divisions only serves to minimize the fact that this corridor has seen continuous evolution of human behavior going back over 20 thousand years. And it serves to downplay the fact that all of that history is African history, not "Nubian" history or "Egyptian" history, it is African history. Nowhere else on earth do we see this kind of arbitrary split taking place in river valleys and other geographic regions. Mesolithic Hunter Gatherers are still part of "European" history even if they didn't look exactly like modern Europeans. Same with Neanderthals. But somehow in the Nile Valley, which is 100% in Africa, they have decided that the Nile below Aswan isn't "African" and part of ancient African history, including the people there. Keep in mind also that some of the first migrations out of Africa occurred along the Nile Valley. But Egyptology is founded on promoting the idea that the culture of the Nile Valley below Aswan is an import from outside Africa as opposed to being an evolution of AFRICAN culture over thousands of years. And that goes along with the European historical doctrine of human evolution towards civilization happening AFTER leaving Africa and goes with the evolution of light skin. And as such, Egypt has been determined to be part of that non African evolution.
Another problem is that African history does not start with "Nubia", no matter how they try and spin it. And "Nubia", as in the 1st cataract, is not the geographical border of black Africa and never has been. If that is the case, then none of the sites above the 1st cataract, such as Wadi Halfa, Wadi Kubbaniya and all those other sites going back 10 and 20 thousand years are "Egyptian" then but black African, ie "Nubian". But they love contradicting themselves every step of the way. Because "Nubiology" doesn't cover any sites going back prior to 5,000 BC even though most of the Meolithic sites in the Nile Valley are precisely in the area between Lower Sudan and Upper Egypt, aka "Nubia". So they want to have their cake and eat it to, by calling Wadi Halfa part of "Egyptian" history and not "Nubian" history, but at the same time calling later groups in the same region "Nubia" after the start of the dynastic era.
Also, many of his statements on that page contradict that core thesis of there being no "Nubia", because a few sentences later he claims that
quote: So I ask again – how is the study of ancient Nubia and "Nubian-ness" not a central aspect of Egyptology?
Which is inherently a contradiction in terms because if there was no place called "Nubia", then there couldn't be a "Nubian-ness".
Not only that his next area of work is to try to connect modern communities in "Nubia" with ancient communities as a single continuous identity as "Nubian", which shows he is reinforcing the concept of "Nubia" as "black pride" and part of this idea that "Nubia" is the start of black African history in 2,000 BC...... given that humans have been in Africa longer than any other place on earth and the Nile Valley is a core part of that history going back many many tens of thousands of years.
quote: The second scenario that stems from the presence of a non-African component in Morocco at least 15 ka is a more radical one, and it reflects back on what we may call, genetically, Africa. Putting together genetic evidence for a Northern exit OoA (Pagani et al. 2015) with the archaeological and palaeoclimatic evidence for a drastic reduction of human presence along the lower Nile Valley from MSI 4 (60-70 ka) until 25 ka (Vermeersch et al. 1990;Van Peer 2004;Vermeersch and Van Neer 2015), one may postulate that the progressive drying out of the North-East African region from 70 ka triggered a population fragmentation in the area (Fig. 1, striped blue area). The majority of these fragmented human groups may have, eventually, died out or merged back with the broader sub-Saharan population. ... ... This is also consistent with the recent dating of the split between Basal Eurasian and other human groups at ~80 ka (Kamm et al. 2018), hence much after the emergence of the first human remains in the Levant, which should then be considered as a failed expansion. The separation between Basal Eurasian groups in North Africa and other Eurasians out of Africa may have been facilitated by the reported reduction or absence of human presence along the northern Nile valley between 70 ka and 10 ka (Vermeersch and Van Neer 2015;Kuper and Kröpelin 2006). These two groups may have come into contact again after 25 ka, consistent with a potential coastal connection pointed out by the Levantine (Belfer-Cohen and Gor-Words, Bones, Genes, Tools: DFG Center for Advanced Studies ing-Morris 2014) and North African (Douka et al. 2014;Jacobs et al. 2017;Barton et al. 2013) material culture (Fig. 1, double pointing light blue and striped arrow). ...
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That seems to be the pattern these days.
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