Professor Yuval Yekutieli from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, will present the Department of Archaeology seminar with a talk entitled,"Egypt in Canaan - a postcolonial look at the earliest (4th mil. BC) colonization of the Southern Levant"

ABSTRACT:

By the very end of Dynasty 0 and the turn into Dynasty 1 (ca. 3100 BC), Egypt consolidated for the first time as a unified political entity, which among other things, expanded into regions beyond the Nile Valley. One of these regions was the coastal plain of the southern Levant. That area attracted the Egyptians since it just became proto-urban, with a few population centers where wealth and surpluses were accumulated. The Egyptians invaded that area and created there what might be best termed as 'a colony' - a political and socio-economic entity where people acted, lived, cooked, and produced objects as in Egypt. Yet, the Egyptians entered an area already settled, a fact that led into an inevitable encounter between them and the indigenous population, . As archaeologists it is a huge challenge to decipher the dynamics of that encounter, since it had happened when writing was just being invented, and all information is derived solely through archaeological investigation. My goal in this talk is to describe this historical event, and propose that by using a postcolonial theory approach, a whole spectrum of a colonial encounter, from collaboration to resistance, might be discerned. 

BIO

Yuval Yekutieli is a senior lecturer at the Department of Bible, Archaeology and the Ancient Near East at Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev. He holds a BA and PhD from BGU, and MA from Tel-Aviv University. Yuval was a visiting scholar at NYU (2008-9), the head of BGU’s Archaeology Division (2011-2013), and a visiting scholar at Oxford University (2015).

His fieldwork is conducted in Israel. His main current research, supported by the Israel Science Foundation, studies the Egyptian Colony in Southwest Canaan in the Early Bronze Age 1. As part of this project he co-directs (together with Polish partners of the Jagiellonian University) an international team in the renewed excavations of Tel Erani, and a BGU team at the site of Mitzpe Sde-Hafir in the Negev Highlands. In previous years he conducted a survey in the southern Judean Desert, studied the late New Kingdom miners' ‘social landscape’ at the Timna copper mines, and directed many salvage excavations.

His publications deal with topics such as Levantine Early Bronze Age, ancient colonialism, proto-urbanism, arid-zones archaeology, landscape archaeology, operation of power in antiquity, social aspects of Bronze Age iconography, and the so called "Early Bronze Age Aniconic Reformation".