 Between 1450 and 1075 BC, ancient Egypt colonized the Nubian city of Tombos located in modern-day Sudan. Currently, a team of Purdue anthropologists led by Professor Michel Bouzon have been studying at Tombos. In 2000, Michel, a graduate student at the time, started excavating there in an ancient cemetery. Almost 20 years later, Michel is still digging up the past to learn more about the ancient lives of the people at Tombos. I think that understanding our past is extremely important. You never really find what you expect to find. We have found a number of really beautiful artifacts. I had no idea that this site would be so interesting. This is a site that's been known for several decades because there are some inscriptions on rocks that border the Nile, and you can tell that they were made during ancient Egyptian activities there. When they were expanding their empire south into Nubia, it looks like the earliest evidence starts about 1450 BC. They were administrators in the Egyptian government, and they were managing the resources that Nubia provided for Egypt. So Nubia has gold and cattle, there's ivory and other sorts of precious goods that Egyptians wanted. My collaborator, Stuart Tayson-Smith, at University of California, Santa Barbara, was on a survey in Sudan looking for Egyptian sites and found that this one had little work being done on it and thought it was a good location to investigate. Our first field season was in 2000, so we started preparing for it about 20 years ago. We work within a specific pyramid shaft, and we work with a group of Sudanese workers that we hire from the local community. So our team probably 15 or so on the larger years, and then we hire maybe about 30 to 40 local workers from the community to work with us. Before you find anything, it's a lot of just kind of brushing and shoveling and getting rid of some of the sand and dirt. You sometimes have to kind of contort yourself in somewhat difficult positions to try to excavate the skeleton or the artifact without disturbing anything. I always excavate either barefoot or in socks just so that you don't accidentally break something or something like that, but really the biggest challenge is that we get a lot of dust storms. When you start excavating something and then the dirt comes back into your tomb, that's not a lot of fun. As we excavate, we are basically destroying the archaeological record, and so the only way that we can then study it is to preserve it the best way we can and to document it. So we take lots and lots of pictures and we have some sketch drawings as well to try to recreate what's there. It's very detailed because we know that we can't go back and do it again. Last season I had the chance to excavate part of a toiletry box, so that was really interesting. It had a razor for shading in there. It had an applicator for putting on eyeliner. It had little ivory boxes that had pigments inside that would have been part of a makeup routine for an individual. One thing I try to remember when I'm excavating is that these are all individuals who lived in the past, right? They were somebody's mother or grandmother, and so in cases when we can find complete burials, it really does feel like a whole person, and so I think each one of those individuals is very important. You know, you have a plan, you have an idea, you write a proposal, but things always change when you're in the field. Based on what you could see from the surface, everything looked very Egyptian, and so we thought it was probably a colony of Egyptians, so it was a surprise to find evidence of individuals who were expressing their Nubian identity and really, really showing that there were Nubians there. And we know this because there are people buried in different styles. Kind of if you think of Egyptians, you think of like an extended body with like arms crossed. You might get something like that, whereas the Nubians might be buried on their side in a flexed position. Nubians tended to be buried on a bed while Egyptians had coffins, and so we see these different styles in the tombs and in the same tombs, so there's Nubians and Egyptians being buried together. It's a really interesting mix. You'll get maybe someone even buried in Nubian style, but has maybe an Egyptian scarab or something, so there is this combination there. So we're trying to sort of give the story of their life through their skeleton. Broadly, we can look at morphological differences in the bones that might suggest different groups. People who are likely coming from an Egyptian area or people who are likely coming from a Nubian area. I've also been working on strontium isotope analysis to try to give some additional data on where people lived when they were children. So by analyzing the strontium in their teeth, I can get a sense of whether or not they grew up in the local area or perhaps they came from Egypt. And what I found was that this isn't just a group of Egyptian colonists that there seems to be evidence of a quite varied morphology in their skulls that indicates it's a mixed group of Nubians and Egyptians. So sort of another indication with the burial practices and the skeletons that tell us that this is a group of Egyptians and Nubians living together. It's very rare for us to be able to tell what somebody died of unless there's, you know, an arrowhead embedded in their body, right? Most people died of things probably infectious disease, heart disease, these sorts of things, but we can tell what they lived with. So we can tell if they had some nutritional deficiencies as a child or if they were dealing with an infectious disease not too long before they died. And one interesting thing that I found is that people were doing really well. They seemed to have adequate resources, so there wasn't a lot of evidence of nutritional deficiency or infection. People were living a fairly long time. They had the kinds of conditions that you expect to see in a pretty healthy but aging population, arthritis and things like that. Using some programs that we have suggests that there are people that probably lived until their 80s at Tombos. Archeology is one way that we can tell the stories of people that haven't been written down. People change over time and I think we like to divide people into different groups, but in reality they may not have saw themselves in these two very separate groups where we say, oh well this is Egyptian, this is Nubian, and we see people combining features from these groups over time that leads to a different identity that we didn't really have represented before in the archaeological record. It's been really wonderful. I think a lot of people don't have a good sense of what Sudan is like, but the community could not be more welcoming. They're very kind, generous people. Hospitality is something that's part of the Nubian culture. Everybody invites us over for tea, for a meal, and we've grown up with the kids there now. I think you go into graduate school with certain ideas about what you want to do, and I took an opportunity to go to this site, and it sounded like a fun opportunity, and it's been an opportunity that's been going on for 20 years now. I had no idea that I would end up working at this site for that long. We're learning more every single season, and it's just interesting on a personal level, and it's been really fun to tell the stories. The research team has recovered over 200 individuals from the site at Tombos, and the analysis of artifacts and remains is ongoing. Michelle Bouzon is planning another trip to Tombos in the winter of 2020. We can expect more exciting discoveries as they continue this important work. Thou wrap up this edition of Boiler Bites. Remember that you can catch up on all our past stories at BoilerBites.com. See you next time.