Pablo Barba

My doctoral project will study the grave goods and other funerary materials from children’s tombs of the Naqada period (ca. 4^th millennium BC), Egypt. Resorting to concepts emerging from the archaeology of personhood, emotions, memory and materiality, these children deadscapes will be studied in order to analyse their relevance in the negotiation of power and social relations in prehistoric Egypt. This project will also further explore the fundamentality of funerary spaces and rituals in Predynastic societies. Three sets of research questions will be addressed:

1) What was the role of children’s tombs in the negotiation of power in the Naqada culture? What emotions, memories and identities were performed in subadult’s funerals to create a specific image of the deceased, and how did these reshape society towards an increasing social complexity?

2) 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?

3) 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 certain children’s deadscapes contribute to the emergence of the Egyptian state?

To diverge from previous studies on Predynastic Egypt, which focused mainly in quantitative analyses, my doctoral project will focus primarily on qualitative aspects of the funerary record, including position of grave goods within the tomb, material fragmentation and body dismemberment, types of pottery decoration… The data will derive mainly from Naqada period cemeteries from the Nile Valley, including materials from published archaeological reports, unpublished excavation records in the Petrie Museum and the Egypt Exploration Society archives, unpublished data from ongoing and recently completed fieldwork and numerous museum collections of across the UK.

Funded 

La Caixa scholarship and UBEL studentship.

Education

• BA, Archaeology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2018

• MA, Archaeology and Heritage of Egypt and the Middle East, UCL, 2019

Barba, P., 2020. Power, Personhood and Changing Emotional Engagement with Children's Burial during the Egyptian Predynastic. Cambridge Archaeological Journal. (published online, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774320000402).