Article Title：Cycles of life and death: Narrative homology and archaeological realities
Abstract：
Egyptian data speak to modern interpreters in many ways; through the rich iconographic repertoire, the materiality of houses and tombs and through the vast corpus of writings left to us. At the New Kingdom village of Deir el Medina (c. 1500-1100 BC) each of these data sets is available and can be used dialectically to gain a more intimate knowledge of lifecycles and individual life experience. Using excerpts from the documents and personal letters of the community I present the villagers' own narratives of life experience: pregnancy, birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age and death. These potent vignettes of life potentially have material correlates in the archaeology of the village-the individual houses and tombs which have remained in a remarkable state of preservation. For instance, the Eastern Necropolis at Deir el Median is layered in terms of the lifecycle: neonates were buried at the base of the slope, followed by children and adolescents mid-slope and adults were buried at the high point of the hill. Using and explicitly narrative style, I aim to show the conjoinings and ruptures between various levels of evidence and, at the same time, allow for a more sensuous and embodied understanding of cycles of life in Egyptian culture.
Keywords: narrative; historical archaeology; Egypt; village life; mortuary data; life stages
DOI: 10.1080/713781493
Source：WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY
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