 I'd like to welcome you back to the new perspectives on ancient new BS series. I'm Aaron Brody, representing the Bade Museum at Pacific School of Religion. And as always, this series is co-hosted by ARF at UC Berkeley. And before I introduce today's speaker, I'd like to welcome our curator, Melissa Craddick. We'll read an introductory statement. Thanks everyone for joining us today. We would like to start by acknowledging that Berkeley, California is on the territory of the Huchun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chuchinio Ohlone. We respect the land itself and the people who have stewarded it throughout many generations, and we honor their elders, both past and present. There is no question that our society is poised at a moment of change. We see it when fellow Americans are unjustly detained, when our citizens are wrongly harmed, and when our communities are in the streets for months on end protesting in order to be heard. The Bade Museum of Biblical Archaeology and Archaeological Research Facility, ARF at UC Berkeley, wish to acknowledge the pain and outrage of our community members who bear the weight of existing in a society designed to work against them and who feel the devastation most keenly. Here at the museum and at ARF, we have been moved by the courage of those most deeply affected and the tenacity of those protesting for change. The Bade Museum and ARF stand in solidarity with the African-American community. We join you in your calls for justice. Collectively and individually, our staff condemns the police brutality and systemic racism that has long been enacted against the Black community and other communities of color. It has persisted for far too long. It has resulted in the unjust and premature ending of lives. So let us say their names. Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmed Arbery, George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and countless others. Let us as organizations be perfectly clear. Black lives matter. We lend our thoughts and actions to those who every day actively work to make the statement a living, breathing ideal and to those who continually live the reality of racial injustice. Likewise, we lend our expertise to the cause by incorporating BLN-sensitive material into our exhibits, programming, and curriculum. We know very well that this moment has been a long time coming, and we are in the fight for equality, justice, and accountability. Through this lecture series, we aim to raise awareness of ancient Nubia, a vibrant region in Northeast Africa with a rich archaeological and historical legacy. Learning about the ancient peoples of Nubia is one way to de-center the usual academic focus on Egypt and biblical and classical lands in order to reconceptualize the past. Decolonizing our views of the past, as through the research presented in the new perspectives on ancient Nubia series, we hope will lead to a more just, present, and equitable future. Thank you, Melissa. So it's my pleasure to introduce our speaker today, Shayla Monroe, who is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Shayla specializes in faunal analysis, the social, zoological archeology of Sudan and Egypt, the archeology of ethnicity in the ancient Nile Valley, and African pastoralism. Her dissertation analyzes the acquisition of cattle at the ancient Egyptian colonial fortress of Asgut and its implications for culture contact and asymmetrical power relations between pastoralists and non-pastoralists. Monroe earned her MA in anthropology from UCSB in 2014. Since 2013, she has worked as an archeologist at the third cataract of the Nile River in Sudan, first at an Egyptian colonial site at Tampos, and then at the Kerma hinterland site Abu Fatima, also in northern Sudan. Monroe is a Eugene Kota Roble scholar and a recipient of the UC President's Dissertation Year Fellowship, who is also involved at the UCHBCU initiative as a field instructor for the UC Santa Cruz Anthropology Program and as a summer mentor for the UC Santa Barbara Classics Program. She serves as a graduate mentor to underrepresented students at UCSB, helping to foster an ethnically and culturally diverse campus. Monroe began her career at Howard University, where she earned degrees in anthropology and English in 2012. She also spent two seasons working at Laramitaj Plantation, also known as the best farm slave village with the National Park Service in Frederick, Maryland. Today, Ms. Monroe's presentation is entitled, Animals in the Kerma Afterlife, Animal Barrels and Ritual at Abu Fatima Cemetery, Sudan. Welcome, Shayla Monroe. We look forward to your presentation. Thank you, Dr. Brody. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. OK, so let me see if I can share this screen. Looking good. Ms. Monroe, we can actually see the notes. OK. Stop it. We'll try it again. So this presentation is about animal burials at Abu Fatima Cemetery. We'll talk about animals in the Kerma Afterlife. So at first, I will give you a background on Kerma and Abu Fatima. And then we'll talk about the development of animal sacrifice in Kerma Funerary Rights, the religious role of sheep versus goats in Kerma, and then a little bit about dogs in the Kerma Afterlife, and the implication for the archaeology of Kerma. And we'll talk a little bit about Saharan connections. And at the end, I'll propose a possible mode of cultural transmission for these burial rites. So the story of Kerma kind of begins with what we call the pre-Kerma transition. Around 3,500 BC, human migration begins to intensify into the southern Sahara and the Sahel. This is, of course, a picture of the Sahara Desert as we know it today. This was a center for pastoralist groups who were highly mobile and moving across the area when there was still rainfall. But drying conditions and desert expansion started to open up new areas for these mobile pastoralists. It removed some of the humidity and episodic barriers that were stopping cowkeepers from moving further south and further to the east and to the west. So you have increasingly mobile pastoralists. They're moving into new areas in search of resources and, most importantly, rain. And here is where you get pastoralists moving into the upper Nile Valley. So from around 3,500 BC up until 1550 BC, we are looking at a state-level society called a Kerma. Well, I mean, I guess they didn't really reach state level until about 2,500 BC. But so this is the time frame that we're looking at. We have the capital city of Kerma somewhere around the third cataract. We're close to the third cataract. So you have an emphasis on agro-pastoralism. And eventually, Kerma grows into an expansionist state about 12 kilometers upstream from the third cataract. So Kerma is known primarily from excavations around Kerma City and the eastern necropolis that houses the Royal Cemetery and also Psy Island, another royal cemetery. And so it's most famous for these royal burials in the eastern necropolis and at Psy Island. And so here is that little circle is where Kerma is in relation to the rest of the Nile Valley. So Kerma chronology is divided into three phases that are there in French because they were created by Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonet. So you have Kerma-Ancien, Kerma-Moyen, and Kerma-Classie, which is essentially ancient, middle, and classic Kerma. So Kerma-Ancien develops into what Jeff Emberlin calls a pastoralist state, which means that unlike other early states where people kind of see a tension between agriculturalists and catapastoralists, pastoralism was in a variety of ways incorporated into the state apparatus in Kerma as it becomes increasingly complex. And Kerma-Ancien grew in response to increased trade in the Mediterranean and continental African regions. And there was a heavy emphasis on animals. Animals were used for meat, dairy, leather, and bone that composed the raw materials for their tools. And animals also occupied like primary roles in Kerma thought, social construction, and cultural logic. So by the time we get to Kerma-Moyen around 2000 BC, Kerma people have mastered long-distance trade and they're amassing an enormous amount of wealth. So some of this wealth is cattle wealth. And here is when you start to see these enormous displays of cattle bucrania or cattle skull that are placed on the top of royal graves. So the dagger that you see here is a dagger with an ivory handle. It was excavated by Charles Bonet and it was discovered in one of the Kerma-Moyen tombs. And so here you start to see the wealth kind of an almost overwhelming sense of unimaginable wealth that's being put on display by the Kerma-Royal families. The largest of the Kerma-Royal tombs had a display of about 4,000 bucrania. So in this day and age, it's hard to imagine. It's hard to wrap your head around the amount of cattle wealth under Kerma's control. So Kerma didn't leave writing. They had administrative seals, but we don't really have a written system of rocker keeping like we do in Egypt. So this is where we tend to look for clues and symbols that kind of help us understand Kerma thought and Kerma ways of knowing. So 1700, we move into Kerma classic. And so this is a period where you see exquisite ceramic craftsmanship, beautiful leather goods. If you look at the pottery here, it looks like it's been glazed, but it hasn't. Kerma people mastered a very, an art of vitrification. They could heat their ceramics to very high levels so that the outside looked almost glass-like, but it's not like they took something slick and put it over top of it. It was just the mastery in mastering that really unique vitrification technique. So when you think of the Kerma people, it's not just that they were wealthy, but also there was a sense of artistry that kind of pervades the way that they're making their clothes, the way that they're making their ceramics, the way that they're making their pottery. You could tell that art was very central to Kerma culture. So during those three periods, we're doing the first two periods, we see the animal sacrifices. But what happens during the Kerma-classique period, and this is towards the end of Kerma's existence as a state, during that Kerma-classique period, we see a shift in the major shift in these two sacrifices. So we see a sharp decline in the number of animal sacrifices being included in royal tombs. And the animals are eventually replaced with people. So towards the end of the Kerma civilization, we're seeing that retainer sacrifice. We're seeing human people who are attached to the royal family being buried with the royal family rather than animals. And we also see the scorpion plaques. So the scorpion plaques lead some scholars to believe that somewhere in the process of these human beings being sacrificed or being buried with their members of the royal family, that there might have been some sort of drug or intoxicant involved, and that perhaps maybe that's kind of like what the scorpion means. But this area where we see the rise in human retainer sacrifice kind of marks the end of this era of animal sacrifice that we're gonna be speaking about today. So looking at the animal world of Kerma, almost all of the information we have about the zoarchaeology of Kerma comes from a Swiss archeologist named Louis Shea. So he first started by studying the Eastern Necropolis which is huge, but he also analyzed with Charles Bonnet Fauna that came from the settlement of the royal city of Kerma. So he's looking at animals that were deposited into tombs in the cemetery, but he's also looking at animals that come from archeological deposits from where people live. In addition to the actual animal bones, there's also visual information that Louis Shea analyzed. There is information about animals from clay sculpture, from wall paintings on the paintings of the walls on Kerma monuments like the Eastern Dufufa and funerary items that have animal imagery, imagery of cattle, sheep, dogs, even like beds. I should have included one that where the shape of the burial bed has the feet or shaped like cow feet. So there's a lot of animal imagery in the artwork of Kerma people that adds to our understanding of what these animals meant to them and their culture. So the development of animal sacrifice at Kerma includes these displays of these cattle, Lucrania, whole animal burials where you have an animal that's not really cut up but it's actually buried whole without being butchered. But then you also have butchered cuts of meat where an animal is treated as if it's food and it is then kind of placed in the grave with the deceased. So there are different types of animal deposits that are all happening in the same grave. So caparines, which means sheep and goat are make up about 45% of the animal sacrifices at Kerma. Most of these caparines were male animals under two years of age. And they are placed in very specific places within the graves. So during the Kerma Moran period or the Middle Kerma period, these animal deposits increased. So here we move to Abu Fatima Cemetery. So Abu Fatima Cemetery is a, we call it kind of like a middle class cemetery. So this isn't a royal cemetery. This is a little bit further away, about 10 kilometers away from the royal cemetery. And so the people being buried here are what the Kerma equivalent of middle class would be. They're relatively elite but not super wealthy. And in this cemetery, we have human and animal burials from the Anshan, Moyan and classic Kerma periods. Abu Fatima Cemetery is under the co-direction of Dr. Sarah Schrader and Dr. Stuart Keisen Smith. And initially these animal feces were a bit unexpected. But excavations from 2015 and 2017 yielded the remain of three goats which were cut up into many, many pieces. I had to count them all. Two young rams that were buried whole and one dog. So unexpectedly we were dealing with an assemblage of animal deposits and we began to compare those animal deposits to the deposits found at the Kerma Royal Cemetery. So one of the things we noticed, like I said, the goats were cut up. So we had two different types of animal deposits there. Now Abu Fatima has some site suppression on the top so we don't actually have any bucrania. But we did have meat offerings and we did have whole animals. And the first type of offering I'm going to talk about is the meat offering. So at the Royal Cemetery, some of the patterns that Shay noticed were that he found similar proportions of right and left elements, meaning that people were chopping up cuts of meat and they weren't, as in some ritual traditions, only using the left side or only using the right side. It seemed like both sides of the body were being used. Meat from the same individuals was normally gathered for an offering in the same grave. So they weren't cutting up one goat and spreading it out over many different graves. They would butcher like one animal and put it there. And so they were clustered by animal. So some tombs in the eastern necropolis contain more than 75 cuts of meat and several of the meat cuts that had Shay found were found in or under pots. So here we have kind of a graphic representation of Shay describing like which cuts of meat. And by cuts of meat, it's like a chunk of an animal. Sorry, but there's no other way to say that, that they were finding, and here's the pattern of how these cuts of meat were being presented in the graves. So what I'm going to show you now are two cuts of meat on an example of what these cuts of meat look like at Abu Fatma instead of the Royal Cemetery. So in the picture coming up, you'll see a shoulder joint. Well, that's the second picture. In the second picture, you'll see a shoulder joint. But in the first picture, you'll see this cut, which is kind of the lower spine leading down to the tail. So both of these are the types of cuts of meat that ancient Kermans would have seen as a culinary cut. So here we have that lower spine. Unfortunately, in terms of comparing to the Royal Cemetery, we're off to a little bit of a rough start because directionally it's supposed to be on the other side, but who am I to judge? But we see that here's that precise cut that he's illustrating is the lower spine going all the way down to the tail. And in here, we have a shoulder cut where you have the scapula and the humerus kind of connected together. And this is placed underneath a pot. So right away we see that the practice at Abu Fatma is similar to that at the Eastern Necropolis and that apparently what we're seeing in the Royal Cemetery might not necessarily be a royal practice, but just a karma practice in general. So the composition of human burials kind of changes over time and the animals that accompanied the human disease changes over time. At the Royal Cemetery in later periods, you'll see multiple burials are common. And you'll also see that some graves have increased meat offerings. So sometimes they're burying more than one royal family member in the same grave. And in those graves where you have multiple family members, you have an increase of meat offerings. So one of the things that these meat cuts give us a chance to do is to look at some of the ancient butchery patterns. One of the things that Shay noticed immediately was that some of the ancient butchery patterns look very similar to butchery patterns in modern day Sudan. And my own observations support that. The still that you see here is from a video I took where I was out watching Nubian people in Tumbo's butcher a sheep. And so in terms of where they actually place the blade and the order and the manner in which they dismember the animal, it is very, very similar to the way that Nubian cultures have butchered these animals in the past. So Shay did notice that butchery patterns in the apocalypse differed from the ancient cities. So they're still treating these butchery cuts like meat, but there's kind of like your everyday butchery and then there's kind of your ritual butchery. So here we just kind of see that the looking archeologically that the breaking of the rib cage and then breaking up of those parts in the middle like that lower spine, et cetera, seem to be performed with some sort of stone axe. And here in the bottom photo, I have a friend, he's our friend of our project, his name is Muhammad. I'm watching him kind of cut this animal up in the same way, removing the legs first and then kind of going to work on that midsection to kind of break apart those different culinary parts in the torso. So what's very interesting about not only just the longevity of this type of butchery practice, but how embodied it is. So as I was going through my videos and my pictures and specifically looking at the ease with which Muhammad was cutting up this animal and breaking the body into those typical butchery parts, I noticed that in all of the pictures, the cigarette in his mouth did not move once. And so to me that says a little bit about how embodied this is and how he doesn't even have to think about it and doesn't even have to put forth so much effort like literally the cigarette did not move in all the pictures. So looking at funerary rights at Kerma and Abu Fatima, we're seeing that there's a ritual deposit of caffeine weed cuts. Shay made the argument to call this a ritual in 2003 because he said that he's defining ritual as rule governed and consistently replicated over time. So as he's looking at the way that these animal deposits are placed, he's looking at where all the different pieces are being placed consistently over time. And he sees that the rule that's being followed over the course of so many generations kind of necessitates that we consider this a ritual. So what we find is that with the exception of that like lower lumbar that's like off to the Northeast, Abu Fatima is generally consistent with the pattern of animal deposits found at the Eastern Necropolis. And so like I said earlier, this is our first chance to kind of look at the fact that, okay, maybe these deposits aren't exclusive to the royal family throughout Kerma-Ansan and Kerma-Moyen, but we're looking at something that is a Kerma-wide practice. We haven't had a lot of data from hinterland sites and cemeteries that were not royal Kerma cemeteries. So now we're starting to see, and we're getting the chance to see, okay, what's a royal practice versus what is a Kerma cultural practice? So we have certain skeletal elements that are absent. We have skulls, mandibles, metapodials and phalanges are not found amongst the meat cuts. We have goat skulls are not used generally by Nubian cultures. Occasionally you will see goat skulls used by one Nubian group, the Pangray people, but in Kerma, the actual heads of goats don't seem to play any visible role. And so the heads are not there, maybe they're not edible or maybe they were used for some other reason, but they're not found amongst the meat cuts. So 45% of the final remains in the Necropolis are belong to Caipirines. You have the meat cuts that are coming from goats and then you have the whole animals that are actually sheep. So we're seeing a difference in the way that sheep and goat are treated in a mortuary sense. And I'm wondering if there's some connection to just kind of the ideological differences between goat and sheep in the Nile Valley. You have plenty of ram gods, which we'll talk about in just a second, but there really are no kind of goat headed gods and goats are not really given that same space in the ideological realm that male sheep or rams are. So in order to actually confirm that I was looking at different treatment for sheep and goats, I had to kind of gather up all of these goat chunks that were placed in these graves. And so at the end of each season, I had to count up all the little pieces for goat, that were goat, and then I had to actually make sure that it was actually goat. So I used a lapham-zader scale, Heather Lapham and Melinda Zader have a scale for making sure that a sheep is a sheep and a goat and goat. In some circumstances, this could have been a zoarchaeological nightmare, but I was able to make it work because I had the best of circumstances. I had a household biological anthropologist who were just kind of helping me make sure that the sheep were sheep and the goat were goat. And then also the biggest benefit I had was that the sheep were buried whole. So the sheep were buried whole with their heads, had sheep there from root of the tutor. So what I had to do was just make sure that all the goat elements were not sheep elements. And so I was able to kind of say with confidence at the end that like all of the butchered meat was goat and all of the two animals that were buried whole were sheep. And so now I have to explain what you are about to see, speaking of sheep. As we were digging and this is January, 2017, I was going down excavating in a tomb and I see as I'm brushing away sand, two little horns sticking up out of the sand. And I've learned after my five seasons in Sudan to be ready for anything. And I just thought, oh Lord, I'm digging up the devil. It really looked like I was digging up the devil because all I could see were these two little horns. So I keep excavating. And then after, you know, I go in a few centimeters down and instead of just two little horns, I see two little horns sticking up and like some orange bangs like coming down in the middle of the horns. And I'm thinking, well, if I'm digging up the devil, this is the goofiest devil that I've ever seen. So I keep going down and this is what I see. So this picture here is he, this little ram kind of became the star of the show. There was some disturbance in the grave. So his head was actually tilted down with his face down in the dirt. But for some reason he's wearing like a head of orange hair. Obviously he was kind of like a golden orange color and he lost all of his fur, except what looks like a two page is kind of sitting on his head. So our conservator goddess actually like really indulged me and she used some consolidate to make sure we could keep his hair on his head. And he now lives with us in the Smith lab at UCSB. But he was one of the two little rams that we found that were buried whole. So sheep and rams in particular are very important in karma. The karma sheep are taller than average, they're kind of rangy animals. And the way they were buried, some of the sheep seem to be like forced into flex positions and placed in leather bags before burial. That's at the Royal Cemetery. Neither of our sheep was in a bag, they were both just out. But here is an example of a sheep that's actually in the right place, but it's right behind the deceased human. So in the ancient Nile Valley, we have two types of sheep and both types of sheep were present in Egypt and karma. First we have a longopiece, which is a sheep that has spiral shaped horns that go out horizontally. So you have an image here of longopiece sheep where you can see the horns just kind of going out to either side. The sheep below it is not a longopiece sheep. It's a sheep that's similar that has those horizontal horns. And it's just there for comparison, as are these two. These are just pictures of sheep that have the type of horns, like longopiece, where they go out to the side. The second type of Nile Valley sheep, or a sheep that we found in Nile Valley, is called platora. And it had semicircular horns that go forward. So what's interesting is that even though both sheep were present in Egyptian culture and karma culture, artistically and in renderings, early Egyptians tended to prefer longopies and the carmens tended to prefer platora. So when you look at early Egyptian ram deities, they tend to have a preference for these horns that go out to the side. And then when you look at kermen deities or karma representations of kingship with the horns, they tend to prefer those forward-facing horns. So sheep symbolism becomes really big it's really big in both parts of the Nile Valley, but sheep become more important ideologically because of climate change. So that same trajectory of climate change that started to drive some of these Saharan pastoralists into the upper and middle Nile is continuing and it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain these huge cattle herds. So as cattle herds are declining and dependence on capreans is increasing, we also see an ideological and artistic importance placed on sheep. And so you start to see the sheep horns kind of everywhere, but it's happening unevenly throughout the Nile Valley. So I think it was Richard LeBron first had this theory that especially towards the new kingdom when you have Egyptian colonialism in Nubia, Amun and other members of the Egyptian pantheon go down to Nubia, some sort of syncretic razzle-dazzle happens with Amun and indigenous Nubian deities and Amun goes back to Egypt with forward-facing horns. Also during this time, it's been pointed out to me that longippies went extinct. So in addition to the sheep with the spiral facing horns, the spiral horns going extinct, we also have that kind of the traveling or we have the kind of the movement of this kind of Kerman idea of kingship or this Kerman imagery of kingship with these forward-facing horns kind of mashing together with the Egyptian god of Amun. So when Amun goes back, his horns are now curled forward. Now this is obviously not an authentic Egyptian statue. This was made by an Italian company that for some reason makes these replicas of ancient Egyptian statues with like 12 packs. It's always like pow, pow, pow, like all down the middle. I am a professional. So I feel like I have to put one of these in every PowerPoint, but I can't talk about forward-facing horns without this like big Marvel version of a Nile Valley ram god. So the next animal, the final animal we talk about is the dog. So we have this dog that we founded Abba Fatma and we also have another dog, a napkin dog that we found at Tampos, but that's neither here nor there. So this was the second dog that we'd actually excavated in a very short amount of time, but this was the only dog that we found at Abba Fatma. And you have to forgive the photo. It was hard to clean the photo in situ because his skin was kind of attached and or her skin was kind of attached and was flaking off. So in terms of dogs at Kerma, there were 22 dog burials in the Eastern necropolis. And there are two types of dogs that we find archeologically in ancient Nile Valley. You have the big mastiff type of dogs that were kind of considered war dogs, but they had a lot of different functions. And then you have the lean dogs that kind of look like a gray hound or a whippet. So these dogs that were founded Abba Fatma and the dog that, the dog was founded Abba Fatma and the dogs that are found in these Kerma graves are the lean type of Nile Valley whippet dog. They are more prevalent in Kerma Ancien and Kerma Moya graves. And in those graves, they were placed behind the capereens. So they're essentially placed behind the sheep in a herding position. That of course was one of the most prevalent roles for dogs in Kerma. Kerma was a pastoralist society. So herding dogs and dogs that could herd sheep and cattle were very important. So the dog at Abba Fatma based on tooth wear and lipping on the vertebrae indicated it was a mature animal. And this contrast with the capereens because the sheep and the goats were all two years and under based on the epiphyseal fusion. So this is different than an animal that's kind of only raised to be a sacrifice. This animal had a collar and appeared to be a companion animal. So based on all of these findings, we have a start to kind of offer a preliminary comparison of these animal deposits at Abba Fatma with those of the Royal Cemetery. So what we see is, we see that there are species specific mortuary treatments at Abba Fatma. Goat are treated one way, sheep are treated another way, valves are buried whole. We have ages at death are the same. The ages of the capereen sacrifices at Abba Fatma are the same as the ages at the Royal Cemetery. We have the placement of some of the Abba Fatma animals matches the placement of the animal deposits at the Royal Cemetery of Karma. So as we continue to work at Abba Fatma, we hope to have many years ahead of us kind of working at Abba Fatma. We have to kind of look for where these patterns will merge and what we're trying to see is how extensively will patterns of placement overlap? Will Abba Fatma continue to look like the Royal Cemetery in terms of animal sacrifices or will it diverge? Will something be different? So we'll be looking to see how similar or how different Abba Fatma and the rest of the animal sacrifices hopefully that we find will be compared to the Royal Cemetery. So Lusche talks about some of the implications of these animal burials in this ritual. The economics of meat sacrifice pointing out that there's something really important about the fact that you can take meat and place it in a grave for a person on a supernatural journey and not use that meat to feed a living person. So there's kind of an economic sacrifices there that kind of tells you that the people at the Royal Cemetery and the people at Abba Fatma could afford it, right? By all accounts, according to Dr. Sarah Schrader, Dr. Michelle Buzan, most of the Kerman populations that we have studied are healthy, well-fit people. So what we're seeing is that it looks like they're able to kind of develop these kinds of sacrifices, number one, because they can afford it. Lusche also noticed some gender differences. He says that on average, there are less meat deposits for women versus men. Now, everybody gets meat deposits. Men, women, children, and elders all get meat in their graves at the Royal Cemetery, but on average, the deposits for women are smaller than they are for men. And on average, the deposits for children are smaller than they are for adults. But one thing that Shea comes back to is this consistent use of space and cardinal direction that there's a very precise method to where the sheep goes, where the goat goes, and it seems to be repeated over and over again over a long period of time. So the meat cuts are most consistently in the northern or western part of the pit. So I guess ours was in the northeastern part of it. One of them was in the northeast part of the pit, so it was still kind of in the north and the sheep are on the other side. So karma animal burials were actually similar to burials of another group of people, the Nubian sea group, their related group of people. And so, Pranila Banksgaard studied the sea group animal burials, and she did a systematic comparison. And what she found, it kind of supports this long standing connection between the karma and the Nubian sea group. There's a lot of overlap in the precision of the animal burials of the sea group and karma. So these similarities kind of point to a shared Saharan connection, kind of like looking at their roots. And not only do you see similarities in the placement of these animals in these burials, you also see the same shift in emphasis. So while both of these cultures are kind of dealing with climate change, you see them kind of shift away from the emphasis on cattle and shift towards an emphasis on calfrenes that are a little bit easier to maintain and keep viable as rainfall is decreasing over time in the region. So whereas Shay placed a greater emphasis on spatial canning, like, look, each thing is in its place, Banksgaard kind of went a little further and emphasized that each species was disposited in a specific order, with sheep being first entered while the tomb was open and cattle going last, you know, kind of being put on top after the grave was closed. And so Banksgaard proposes that this order is significant because of this idea that sheep are, you know, associated with the community of the living and that cattle are associated with the realm of the ancestors. So this is an interesting idea to keep in mind. And thinking about this, I think I wanted to approach this kind of thinking about the physical and bodily experience of performing this ritual. So what I tried to imagine was what would it look like if we work through the burial step by step? First the tomb is like opened and then a cattle hide is prepared. So one of the similarities between these Kerman burials and these sea group burials is that before anything begins, the entire tomb is kind of lined with the hide of cattle. Then the human is placed first because it's the human's grave. The human is lowered into the grave. Then the whole caverines, the whole sheep are placed into the grave. After the sheep comes the meat cuts where you have a goat that is recently skinned and freshly butchered. After the goat comes the pottery. So you saw how the goat was kind of tucked underneath the pot. Sometimes the goat is in the pot and sometimes the pottery is kind of stuck on top of it. Then after the goat comes the dog. So if there's a dog in the tomb, the dog is kind of herding the sheep. So the dog is put behind the sheep, the caverines. And then once the tomb is covered over that last bit is if it's a royal tomb or if it's an early sea group tomb, those bucrania are then gonna go on top. So you have kind of this order that people are doing things in and the consistency is not just through time over this 800 years. It's also kind of across a very large geographical space. So theorizing ancient memory keeping, the question is how was the ritual kept so consistent over time? How was the knowledge handed down to the generations? How would Kermans and sea group Nubians teach and learn the order and placement in a ritual that was hundreds of years old? So if this starts around 2500 BC and ends around 1700 BC, this is 800 years that the people who didn't have writing are passing along a very precise type of knowledge. So I think in order to answer this question, we have to go way back to the beginning. We have complex cattle keepers as early as 6,200 BC in the central Sahara. Now, this is not when the relationship between like cattle and spirituality begins, that's much earlier. But what we can see in the central Sahara around 6,200 BC via rock art and monumental burials is a very intensified way of using cattle in burial that is like well-established and is prolific by 6,200 BC. So these populations are moving back and forth between the Nile. And this kind of leads to another archeological horizon that David Wynne grown all called the primary pastoral community. So in the next millennia between like 5,000 and 4,000 BC, I guess like two millennia later, what we're seeing is an archeological horizon made up of several categories of material evidence that when cattle keepers start to leave the Sahara and move south into the Libyan Desert, into the Watties, they're bringing with them something more than cattle. So there's a cultural horizon that comes in when we see this influx of the way that cattle cultures are coming in from the desert and influencing bodily performance. They are cycling from the Sahara to Upper Nubia and then Northward and they're bringing things like new types of combs, new types of jewelry, new types of beads based from long-distance trade. And so like this little collection of doodads might not look like much, but to an archeologist looking at like new sophisticated tools for doing your hair, looking at new tools for making clothing, looking at makeup palettes that have more colors. What we imagine when we see something like this is people coming into the Nile Valley, their hair is laid, their face is bead, they got the beads, the pendants, the bangles, possibly some piercings, from an archeological point of view, it just looks like these cattle keepers come into the Nile Valley with like a full pastoralist drip and just stunt on everyone because this is something new in terms of like this very intensified bodily display of like turning your body into a work of art. So this is a time that's very generative. These centuries when these cattle keepers are moving towards the Nile, this is a time when art is flourishing, this is a time when sculpture is flourishing, it's a time of fluorescence and human expression. And so after 4000 BC, we have this kind of leaderband culture, which is kind of like a mash-up of a bunch of people. They're in this area around these, the Libyan desert, but then below that you have the Hoara and Wadi Amalik. And in this area, this is where linguist Claude Rie is looking at this area. He said, you know, he thinks that this is where the mother language of the Nubian language family is formed in this time and place. So languages are exploding and artistic styles are exploding and this is a time of intense like intellectual fluorescence. So what does this have to do with the ritual? Oh, also, sorry. This is Lakia, which was a central node for intense culture contact between all of these different pastoralist groups kind of coming and going between the Sahara and the Nile. So I guess what I wanted to say with this slide was that instead of looking at the Saharan migrations kind of like swooping in smoothly, we have to think that there's a period of time when people are just moving very intensely in this place, also coming in from Western Darfur like over to the West. And so this is a time of that intensified creativity and fluorescence. So that Saharan migration into the Nile doesn't look like an arrow, that's really smooth. It just looks like all these people everywhere exchanging ideas and really kind of like leaning into these centuries of intense creativity. So back to the rituals at Kerma and the question of how was the ritual kept so consistent over time and space? How was the knowledge handed down through generations? How would Kermans teach and learn the order and placement in a ritual that was hundreds of years old? I'm thinking perhaps through song. So this is a thought experiment. I have absolutely no evidence. It is just kind of the hypothesis of a hypothesis. Thinking, being in Northern Sudan those five seasons and thinking about Nubian culture and thinking about how music in Nubia is not just like an afterthought or a hobby but it's so central to community life. One of the things I'm thinking is that music might have been a repository for how these ritual protocols were supposed to take place. Music is so central to community life and songs and poetry, song traditions and poetic traditions tend to travel with pastoralists. So what if at some point in that Wadi Hoa region they're developed a song that had to do with how these burials take place and then over time as people spread out into the Nile Valley they go their separate ways and they have their variation of the song but the song is what's keeping everything so completely consistent and in order because it becomes a way to kind of preserve the memories of the ritual. So why would I even like propose this like hypothetical burial ballot? It's just a reflection on my part. My initial reflections for what type of institution might have been responsible for keeping this kind of ritual knowledge were so Western and they didn't really make a lot of Nubian sense. So this is kind of an exercise for me to think like even as we get more data even as we measure these patterns that our hypotheses kind of have to be in conversation with living Nubians and living Nubian culture and also like the hypothesis should make kind of a Nubian kind of sense. So here's one possible explanation for how this knowledge was passed down. A song or kind of a burial ballot where the burials telling how the burial should be conducted explaining to the people burying what goes where and explaining the roles that these animals play in the human journey to the afterlife. And that's it. As always, I'm gonna thank the people of Tumbles. Thank you so much for this super fascinating talk. We have a ton of questions that I'm gonna start throwing at you. But before I do that, I just wanna briefly respond. Well, first thank you for sharing your hypothesis about the song and how that might carry memory through generations. And I wanna respond to that because I thought of in my area of research in the Levant, Bronze Age Levant, the Canaanite story, The Tale of Akat. So it's a piece of literature that basically part of it goes through each step that would take upon the death of someone in a high status household, the number of years someone would mourn, where the mourning would take place, who was involved in the, at least vaguely the roles of the different people who were involved. And even some of the material culture including use of music like symbols and other instruments. So I just wanted to point that out if in case you're not aware of it and maybe we can chat about that. I'm not, but I would love to chat about that. Like it's, this is a new area for me. I look at dead animals. So like I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about like, well, how did I know where to put it? You know, that's fascinating. So yeah, I'll follow up with you about that. I wanna get to some of our audience questions. There are really so many that came in. Quite a few about dogs. I think whenever dogs enter the picture people love to latch onto that. So one question less about the dogs and the burials and more about dogs in everyday life. Is there archeological evidence for Kerman's relationships with dogs like training or breeding that might give us some insight as to why they were put into burials? Um, you know, Shay speculates that it really is just kind of the primacy of herding in the culture. In terms of breeding, you know, he also says that the dogs in the Kerman cemetery are all the same size, which if they're not being specifically selected, you know, there is a chance that someone's kind of breeding them to kind of all look alike. And you know, the other thing is just like weird little tidbits, like sometimes he could find stomach contents and the dogs ate a lot of fish. So, I mean, they're living on a river. So fish is something that they would like feed to the dogs. Okay, great. Thank you. That's really fascinating that they're all the same size for great evidence possibly for breeding. Um, is there evidence as to why the dogs were killed for burial? Oh, sorry. As to whether they were killed for burial specifically. Well, I mean, they're in there, you know? So, I can't imagine, I would imagine that the dog was probably put down at the same time as the sheep. Yeah, it doesn't make sense for them to take like a dog that's already dead and like put it in there. I think it's, yeah, it's a little bit, you know, kind of jarring, but also you have to think that, you know, towards the end of, you know, Kerma Classic, it wasn't dogs so much as it was people. So, this is a culture that has very different sense of what needs to happen when a royal person gets buried. And so, and then later on we have horse burials in Nubia, you know, as horse culture kind of comes into the Sudanese kingdoms, you know, sometimes kings are buried with their horses. So, and not just kings, but other people too. So, the idea of an animal going with you into the afterlife seems a little bit jarring to us, but for them it was probably like, well, I'm going on a journey, I gotta take my dog, you know? Yeah, and based on the sequence of burial that you reconstructed for us, it seemed that this would be a relatively quick burial. So, maybe all taking place within one day as opposed to a prolonged process. Right. Okay, yeah, so that makes sense. So, based on that reconstruction that you shared with us, the order that the species and materials were added to the graves, can archeologists begin to reconstruct a standard or regional burial sequence? You did mention that it seems to be pretty consistent over time and space. So, would you call it some kind of standard sequence? I would call it a testable hypothesis because, you know, I made this on PowerPoint, you know? So, but also realizing that kermarchaeology, like for a long time, Louis Shea was the only one in the game. We're still putting all of this together piece by piece. So, it's very nascent, it's emergent. So, yeah, this is a testable standard. I mean, I wouldn't call it a standard, I'd call it a testable hypothesis that hopefully, as other people gather more grave data, they can say, okay, they can match this and say, does this kind of fit this pattern? Then we might have something if we could get, you know, more people kind of weighing in and adding data to it. Yeah, well, on that note, that's also what I researched in the Le Van is burial sequences. So, I would love to exchange more with you after this about that. So, shifting gears a little bit now to the modern Nubians that you were photographing and observing doing the butchery. Do they employ any kinds of songs or chants as they were conducting that ritual butchering? No, I didn't see, I mean, songs are happening all over the place, but I didn't see any butchery-specific songs. Yeah, but it was very, I don't wanna say joyful. It's kind of like a fun guy thing. If that makes any sense, like, you know, when they come together to butchers, like if you're gonna butcher a whole sheep, that means everybody's eating. That means you're probably having, you know, some sort of get-together. That was a get-together where they did two sheep. And it's kind of, it's a little bit rowdy and, you know, the guys are joking and laughing. It's very like, it looks fun. Like, I don't wanna do it or touch it, but from the outside, there's a lot of camaraderie and there's like a lot of fun when they come together to kind of like do this like, up-inning. So I didn't see any song, but I also know that there are certain people within the village who are like known to be good butchers and it's a valuable skill. Like, you get a lot of respect if you are the person. Like our butcher extraordinaire is this guy named Heism. You get like a lot of respect if you're really good at like skinning and cutting the animal like well. No related question. Are there clear patterns in terms of, like social patterns is always men who are doing the butchering in these kinds of ritual scenarios? From what I've seen, yes, but you also have to realize, so this is like Nubian roots with kind of like a Sufi culture, Islamic culture like laid on top of it. So because of that, and I'm not really sure how that works, I'm not sure it's like, I'm not sure it would be cool for women to do this because it's kind of gross. And, you know, the thing about Tumbo's is kind of sweet when you think about it. People make sure that women don't have to really do things that are gross. Like, so it's just kind of like, it's kind of like in their kind of religious culture to not like, you know, I mean, it's an animal. So there's intestines like have to be squeezed out. And so it's kind of against that sensibility to have like women squeezing intestines. That's like, no, let the boys do that, you know? I mean, I hope I'm not over generalizing, but that's the sense that I get. Like there are certain things that they don't, they're just like the men are like, we'll do that, you know? Yeah. So going back then to the ancient evidence, could the difference in treatment between the goats and the sheep be based on a more practical consideration of whether they were food animals and supply secondary products as opposed to this ideological interpretation? Well, they're both food animals, right? So in the world of the living, people are eating both sheep and goat. And, you know, there are reasons why, you know, some people like sheep, sheep are really fatty. Goats reproduce more often. So, you know, there's an advantage to keeping both goat and sheep. There are several advantages to kind of keeping these mixed herds. They're all being eaten by the living. The difference is, and they're all going into, you know, the grave. But the difference is, you know, why not butcher the sheep? And so Shay's thinking that this is something about the journey. Like something's happening on this death journey where I need my sheep hole, I need my dog hole. The goat is associated with pottery. It's like in a pot or under a pot. So there's the food. He calls it like a viaductum, but that's also like him speculating on, you know, maybe this person is being given things for, you know, a trip for a journey. And so that, that's the, I don't know, you know, what is practical? That might be, you know, from Nubian point of view, that might be practical. It's like, you know. It could always be a combination. Yeah. Practical and ideological, right? Okay, so I'm gonna ask one final question so that we can wrap it up. So on that same topic, talking about the consumption of meat, when you were showing the possible reconstruction of a burial with the leather on the bottom and then the head or the bucrania on the top of the grave, what would then happen to that cattle meat? Because there's a lot that's left over, presumably it would be eaten and it, so is that assumption true? And if so, would it be in a kind of feast scenario? So that's what we're guessing. So feasting and cattle feasting they shouldn't necessarily be seen as separate. And this is going back through the Wadi Hoar. This is going back all the way to Sarah. You see these enormous, first of all, you see the heads being used on the graves. This is going back, you know, the earliest is actually like around 10,000 BC, like, but that's a wild cow, it's not a domesticated cow. But yes, you can assume that there's some sort of feast involved. So try, and I guess that's part of my reflection is trying not to think of this as a somber occasion just because that's how we conceptualize as death. People are eating at these funerary feasts. There is food involved. So I guess that's the thing, like thinking of it as both things that happen when someone dies. Yes, there is special placement of the bones in a certain way, but there's a lot of food happening. You know, cows have a lot of meat on them. People, you need a lot of people to kind of eat all that food without a refrigerator. So you imagine that even though there is kind of what she calls an economic sacrifice, the economic sacrifice is not divorced from like economic reality, which is we don't need to waste this. We need to pull together as many people as we can to eat all this beef so that it didn't go to waste. So I see them as two things that would have very commonly throughout all of these cultures happened at once. Everybody's gonna eat and we're also gonna, you know, have what we need in order to complete this kind of spiritual ritual. Well, thank you so much. Gonna end it there. This concludes our lecture and our Q and A segment for today. Thank you so much, Shayla Madaro, for sharing your time and your expertise with us and with the wider public who's tuning in today and who watches this video in the future. Thank you to the viewers for your interest in this topic and in the history of this region of the world and in our efforts to try to engage with and reconceptualize the past. Please make sure to join us for our next new perspectives on ancient Nubia lecture series brought to you by the Vada Museum and ARF, which is scheduled for February 18th at noon.