Egyptian state formation and the entanglements of personhood, power and emotions in Predynastic children's burials.

As feminist scholars have argued for the past three decades, childhood has been erased from historical developments and remains absent in archaeological narratives, despite its importance for understanding political processes such as state formation. Egypt is no exception, despite the rich archaeological data available for the Nile valley, mainly from cemeteries, which has the potential to significantly enhance childhood studies: it is in the material record from graves where children are best identified.
Regarding the state as a new set of defining social practices, this research studies the connection between the changing emotional engagement with children's death and the development of a stratified society during the 4th millennium in the Nile valley. The relationship between emotions, materiality and the negotiation of power in subadult's funerary spaces will be explored in order to address the following questions:
- What was the role of children's tombs in the negotiation of power in the Egyptian Predynastic? What emotions, memories and identities were performed in subadult's funerals to create a specific image of the deceased?
- Which material culture was actively deployed in children's tombs during funerals? How do the qualitative aspects of grave goods relate to power dynamics through the performance of emotions, memories and identities?
- How did subadult's funerary assemblages and social complexity evolve concurrently throughout the 4th mill. BC? When do major shifts in the emotional engagement with the death of children emerge? How did children's deadscapes contribute to the emergence of the Egyptian state?
Cemeteries were the locus of social relationships in the Predynastic period, an arena for mourners to engage with the deceased through burial practices. Thus, I focus in ritual contexts such as graves and funerals where objects were deployed to create images of different individuals/groups to reorder society. I examine what kinds of archaeological assemblages constituted children's graves and establish how they evolved through the Predynastic, trying to relate the modifications in the mortuary rituals to changes in the negotiation of personhood, identity and power relations in Egyptian cemeteries. Instead of focusing on quantitative aspects, my research will explore qualitative traits of the funerary record, such as the fragmentation of material culture and the dismemberment of the body. This will allow me to evaluate how objects and other remains of the mortuary treatment might be involved in the manipulation of emotions (such as grief), social identities and personhood.
The analysis draws in new data from unpublished excavation archives, direct examination of excavated assemblages in museum collections and from fresh data emerging from ongoing fieldwork, as well as published data from a century of research in the region. Through statistical analysis of the collated database, I will examine the existence of various historical trends and groups that afford a macro-scale analysis of social dynamics during state formation.
This research will contribute to connect Egyptology with current debates in contemporary sociology, anthropology and archaeological theory, like personhood and identity, materiality and emotions or childhood studies. On the other hand, theoretical reflection also implies self-criticism on our access to data. Most of reports, archives and collections housing Egyptian materials come from a European colonial and imperialist past. It is thus our responsibility to both make these collections relevant to contemporary research and reflect over its problematic nature as a foundation of orientalist discourses. Finally, this doctoral thesis aims not only to foster academic research on childhood, but to open a relevant dialogue between children and archaeological heritage in order to create new spaces in museums and collections to involve this usually forgotten audience.