Carol Redmount Professor Near Eastern Studies

Research Interests:  Archaeology of Egypt and the Levant

Prof. Redmount's research activities continued to focus dominantly on the two major field projects for which she is the principal investigator: 1) the Tell el-Muqdam Project; and 2) the Egyptian Modern Pottery Project. Specific phases of both these endeavors are now very close to completion. In addition, she spent this past summer in Berkeley, rather than in the field, preparing two major publications: a) a revised version of her dissertation (on an archaeological survey of the Wadi Tumilat, a valley in Egypt that extends from the eastern Delta to the Isthmus of Suez); and 2) a volume on Egyptian Pottery, edited by her and Professor Cathleen Keller, which the ARF is publishing (hopefully as volume 8 of a revived University of California Publications in Egyptian Archaeology series; the last volume in this series was published in 1965, and all seven of the earlier volumes-the first came out in 1905-were UC Berkeley-based works). Other publication manuscripts she has completed in the past two years are listed below.

1) The Tell el-Muqdam Project

The Tell el-Muqdam Project has been funded by The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Bioanthropology Foundation, UC Berkeley's Irving and Gladys Stahl Foundation, and private donations, many derived from tours undertaken expressly for the purpose of generating funds for the project (more than half of the NEH grant was matching). The fourth and probably final season of archaeological fieldwork at Muqdam, a major but neglected first millennium B.C. urban site in the Egyptian Delta, took place in the spring and summer of 1996. This season ended the current NEH funding cycle and concluded the collection of base-line archaeological field data for the site. As in earlier seasons, fieldwork was co-directed by Prof. Redmount and Dr. Renee Friedman, formerly a graduate student in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and now a research associate at the British Museum in London; and UCB faculty and present/former students participated in the project.

The 1996 field season was purposely limited in scope and planned specifically to conclude their basic study of the site. The spring session of excavation at Camel Station, directed by Dr. Friedman, focused on completing the excavation of the Ptolemaic metal, apparently bronze, smelting installation uncovered in 1995, and on excavating a final square down to the water table. This work confirmed the basic occupational sequence uncovered in previous seasons, clarified the character of several architectural sub-phases, and further corroborated the severity of the Saite period destruction located at and just above the water table. The summer session, directed by Redmount, concentrated on completing the geoarchaeological auger survey begun in 1995 and on making a dent in processing the backlog of ceramic and other material culture that had accumulated from our earlier field seasons. The auger coring survey provided a rough three dimensional picture of the physical development of the tell through time. The deepest and earliest cultural sediments encountered during coring lay approximately 2 m to 4 m below the current water table, which varied in depth between about 70 cm and 3 m below present ground surface levels. No cultural material earlier than the Third Intermediate Period (which begins about 1060 B.C.) was encountered anywhere on the site, above or below the water table. The augering identified a probable river channel, most likely the Mendesian Nile branch, on the eastern portion of the tell. This channel migrated eastward over time. The cores suggest that tell development and Nile distributary migration were tied together dynamically. Increases in overall tell size occurred in all directions in response to cultural development, and in an eastward direction in response to Nile channel migration. In addition, the coring program succeeded in establishing approximate site boundaries in three directions (N, S, E).

The four seasons of fieldwork at Tell el-Muqdam have helped achieve a new understanding, culturally and geoarchaeologically, of this neglected and endangered major Delta site about which little was known previously. For the first time they are now able to provide a baseline characterization of the tell and its occupation and development. Muqdam was a large and prosperous city throughout much of the first millennium B.C., and, despite disturbances, the site has well preserved archaeological deposits dating especially to the mid first millennium B.C. They now know that Muqdam was founded in the Third Intermediate Period and occupied, more or less continually, into late Roman or Byzantine times. The character of the Third Intermediate Period deposits is difficult to determine as these lie almost entirely below the present water table. Saite period (Dynasty 26, 664-525 B.C.) occupation was extensive and marked by at least one major destruction; some of the earlier Saite deposits also appear to be below the water table. The Persian period (Dynasty 27, 525-404 B.C.) occupation appears to have been particularly large and important, and we have uncovered areas of both elite and non-elite domestic architecture (Camel Station and Qasr Station, respectively), as well as an industrial sector (Iuput Station). As far as they have been able to determine, the Hellenistic layers appear to be mostly missing in the preserved strata; these may have suffered most heavily from earlier disturbances of the tell. The Roman period town seems to have been founded on unoccupied or sparsely occupied ground along the southern edge of the earlier city. They can now infer that the major religious sector of the city, where one or more temples were probably located, lay in the northwest quadrant of the tell, which has been severely disturbed and in which any preserved and undisturbed archaeological strata presently lie at or below water table. As yet, unfortunately, Muqdam has produced no decisive evidence regarding one of their initial research questions: the location of the seat of the Twenty-third Dynasty, which Kitchen places at Tell el-Muqdam and most others now locate in Thebes. Muqdam has, however, provided evidence of Egyptian trade with Greece and the Levant; further details regarding the extent of this trade and its ramifications await completion of the on-going pottery analyses of our ceramics expert.

Several preliminary reports on the work at Muqdam have been completed, and a two-part publication monograph is underway. Initially this work was conceived as one volume incorporating a preliminary report and a second volume as a final report. In the end, however, it made more sense to publish the preliminary reports as articles and concentrate on the monographs as a final report. Consequently, after the 1996 season, we shifted the original focus of the planned volumes and reorganized their content. The revised first volume of the final publication is now approximately seventy percent complete. It focuses on the results of the archaeological fieldwork to date (regional survey, surface and magnetometer surveys, auger coring program, test and other excavations, and epigraphic recording of inscribed architectural or sculptural fragments) and will also review the history of prior research at the site. The second volume will deal with the pottery and other material culture finds (small objects, bones, and so forth) from their excavations. One further study season is planned for the summer of 1998 to conclude the field processing and study of excavated pottery and other finds. Once the backlog of excavated materials has been processed in Egypt (local regulations prohibit export and study abroad), Redmount will decide whether to seek another round of funding for further fieldwork at Tell el-Muqdam (focusing on particular archaeological problems relating to the time period-mid first millennium B.C.-accessible at the site), or whether to initiate new or renewed archaeological investigations at another site in Egypt. Her co-director has already shifted her efforts towards directing work at her own archaeological site in Upper Egypt, although she continues to have publication responsibilities at Muqdam. At present Redmount too is leaning towards seeking a new site, provided this is permitted by Egyptian authorities, as, disappointingly for her own interests, Muqdam has produced no in situ finds dating prior to the first millennium B.C. and the material accessible above the water table is predominantly mid-seventh century B.C. or later. She would prefer, if possible, to work at a site with a broader temporal range of Pharaonic material in order to accommodate a variety of research interests, her own as well as those of current and future graduate students.

2) The Egyptian Modern Pottery Project

The Egyptian Modern Pottery Project (EMPP) has been supported by a fellowship from the American Research Center in Egypt (fieldwork), as well as by the Irving and Gladys Stahl Foundation and Hellman Junior Faculty Fund (technical analyses). The EMPP is an on-going ethnoarchaeological field research project that studies modern traditional Egyptian potters and pottery in order to gain insights into ancient Egyptian pottery. Between 1989 and 1995, in the pilot phase of the project, samples of modern Egyptian pottery manufactured by traditional potters were collected and analyzed. The collected ceramic material included both whole vessels and sherds that were predominantly, but not exclusively, manufactured in and obtained from the Delta and Cairo regions. Some of the samples were purchased or gathered in conjunction with a visit to the potters producing the wares. Others were bought from pottery stands. Still others were collected from refuse locations, typically the final stop in the life-cycle of a ceramic vessel. A total of 165 samples was analyzed visually and microscopically (under a binocular microscope at a power of 20) in Cairo; all but a few of these samples were drawn and photographed as well. In 1994 she was able to add an archaeometric component to the project when funding for chemical analysis of pottery samples became available from the Irving and Gladys Stahl Endowment. The archaeometric analyses are a cooperative research effort between Redmount (as senior archaeologist) and Dr. Maury Morgenstein of Geosciences Management Institute Inc. (as senior scientist). Dr. Morgenstein holds a Ph.D. in Geology and Geophysics and has an extensive background in chemical and petrographic ceramic analyses; he is also the site geoarchaeologist for Muqdam.

Last spring Redmount completed a 150-page manuscript describing work on the pilot phase of the project. This will be published in the forthcoming ARF volume on Egyptian Pottery for which she is also co-editor.

This past year, with support Redmount received from the Hellman Junior Faculty Fund, she also was able to submit a further suite of samples for archaeometric analysis. These samples included a series of raw materials and end-products collected from a traditional potter's workshop in Old Cairo in 1995, as well as a series of different samples from the same pot, taken from several different pots, and further ceramic samples from areas in Egypt not tested in the prior analysis. The study had four major goals: 1) to determine the correlation's between raw material and end products; 2) to confirm that samples from different locations on the same pot do indeed produce similar chemical signatures; 3) to test the influence of wash and glaze on the chemical signature of the pot; and 4) to expand the available analytical data base for pottery of known provenience. As in previous work, the chemical analysis included a multi-method, multi-element quantitative analysis package that consisted of neutron activation analysis (NA), inductively coupled plasma analysis (ICP) and X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF). In addition, a whole rock analysis by X-ray fluorescence spectrometry was also run on each sample to obtain the major elements, loss on ignition (LOI) and a short list of trace elements that supplemented the other analytical procedures. This time, however, in order to test the sensitivity of additional elements, a more sophisticated 64 (rather than 50) element analysis was utilized. Dr. Morgenstein again undertook petrographic analysis of all samples. Results of the analyses have generated two articles, now close to completion, specifically on EMPP concerns: Geochemical and Petrographic Analysis of Raw Materials and Finished Modern Ceramics from a Traditional Pottery Workshop, Old Cairo, Egypt; Consistency and Variation of Major and Minor Trace Elements in Individual Modern Egyptian Ceramics, With and Without Washes and Glazes. In addition, the study also has implications for a broader study of , and a third article on this subject is also close to completion: Proveniencing Modern Egyptian Ceramics with Boron, Gallium, Rubidium, Beryllium, Thorium and Vanadium Authigenic and Detrital Indicators of Clay Paste Sediment Source Depositional Environments. With the completion of these three technical articles, the pilot phase of the EMPP will be ended.

She is currently planning the next round of fieldwork, which will investigate pottery workshops, raw materials, end products, marketing mechanisms and distribution patterns in particular regions of Egypt. Dr. Maury Morgenstein will continue to serve as project geologist. In addition, a cultural anthropologist, who is fluent in Arabic and who has spent almost two decades working in Egypt (and who has served as an informal advisor for the project), has expressed interest in future work, and they are hoping she will be able to join the research team for the next phase of investigation.

Recent Publications

"Major and Trace Element Analysis of Modern Egyptian Pottery". Journal of Archaeological Science (forthcoming; with M.E. Morgenstein)

"The Wadi Tumilat and the Canal of the Pharaohs," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 54 (1994): 127-135

"The 1993 Field Season of the Berkeley Tell el-Muqdam Project: Preliminary Report", Newsletter of the American Research Center in Egypt 164 1994: 1-10 (with Renee Friedman)

Last modified 4 February 2000.