The topic

The fortifications at Uronarti in Lower Nubia were among a string of massive monuments built by the kings of Egypt’s 12^th dynasty when they established control over this gold-bearing region.

While the fortresses were imposing military monuments, they were also locations of interaction between the Egyptian garrison and local Nubian populations, as well as places of domestic and production activities. Since 2012, a joint mission of Brown University and Swansea University has been conducting an excavation and survey at Uronarti and the surrounding area to address questions of both colonialism and daily life at this outpost.

This talk will present recent finds from that project, including one of the best-preserved ancient Egyptian pottery kilns yet known, a settlement of stone huts outside the fortress, and construction layers from the earliest phase of the site that highlight the impressive engineering necessary to conquer this forbidding landscape.

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The speaker

Dr. Laurel Bestock is an archaeologist and art historian of ancient Egypt. Currently Associate Professor of Archaeology and Egyptology at Brown University, where she teaches everything from archaeological methodology to the Amarna Period, she holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Interest in kingship and ideology runs through much of her work, including the current work at Uronarti, more than a decade of excavations at Abydos, and a book entitled Violence and Power in Ancient Egypt: Image and Ideology Before the New Kingdom. Her current research includes a software development project creating an open-source tablet-based field recording system for archaeologists that is currently in use by projects working as far afield as Sudan, Italy, and Peru.

Dr. Bestock served for many years as a board member of the American Research Center in Egypt.