Cancelled: Chicago: Excavations on the Wah-Sut (South Abydos) Periphery

Lecture Abstract:

This paper discusses the numerous issues and questions regarding the development of the settlement site at Wah-Sut after its heyday. Though it had been convincingly demonstrated by 1999 that the architecture of the town of Wah-Sut dated to the Middle Kingdom, artefacts from the succeeding Second Intermediate Period and New Kingdom were often noted since the beginning of archaeological operations there over a century ago. The puzzling existence of said artefacts (chiefly ceramic) without associated architecture has raised questions about the physical location and organization of post-Middle Kingdom Wah-Sut from the outset. Answering these questions has the potential to shed light on the fate of so-called Middle Kingdom “planned” settlements after the demise of the Middle Kingdom state, as well as give a possible template for how provincial New Kingdom towns may have looked like in general. Test units laid down in 2022, east of the Middle Kingdom town, revealed several buildings of clear New Kingdom date for the first time. Though insubstantial, these structures are promising signs that the University of Pennsylvania expedition is approaching the elusive New Kingdom settlement, and that the focus of settlement had, in fact, migrated east. Efforts that season also explored an enigmatic structure several hundred meters south of the Middle Kingdom town, described by C.T. Currelly as a “Roman Farm” in 1904. Investigations indicated that this “Roman Farm” actually reflects a chapter in Abydene history later than previously supposed.

Speaker’s Bio:

Rolland Long graduated from the University of Chicago with a AB from the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 2017, matriculating into the University of Pennsylvania’s PhD program in Egyptian Archaeology that same year. He has participated in 5 field seasons at South Abydos since then, and will be back in the summer to gather more data for his dissertation on the continued post-Middle Kingdom habitation of the town site there.