Research

When I started researching Meroitic textiles, I was very much stricken by the omnipresence of the color blue. Beside few isolated cases of reddish-brown embroideries, much the decorative features in tapestry and embroidery showcase different shades of blue. It is particularly noteworthy when compared to the pristine whites of Pharaonic linens or to the Romans’ love for purple. Quite naturally, my curiosity turned towards the symbolic significance of blue in ancient Sudan and its possible

One of the key characteristics of Meroitic textiles resides at their very heart: before the threads and weaving techniques, it is their raw material – cotton fibres – that defines them as a unique textile tradition. Among the hundreds of textiles that I have been studying so far, up to 80% are solely made of cotton.  As a young researcher first working on textiles, I did not pay much attention to that fact. As it was

Seminar at Centre for Textile Research, University of Copenhagen Monday 21st of January 2019 Together with the Centre for Textile Research, the Textile Archaeology in Egypt and Sudan research group will organize a one-day conference focusing on current research in textile archaeology along the Nile Valley. Fourteen scholars - many of them young researchers - will share their current work on textile finds discovered in Egypt and Sudan and dated from the Prehistoric to the

Fourth research stay: Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia. A leitmotiv of Meroitic textiles, the color blue is omnipresent in virtually all decor: stripes, embroideries, tapestry…etc. Sometimes, it even covers the entire expense of the fabric. Interestingly, it is very rarely associated with another color and is a constant companion to the use of cotton. So much so that it seems that Meroitic textiles are best defined by a camaïeu of white and blue

Tell me what you wear…. And I will tell you who you are? Third research stay, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada In our world of infinite fashion choices, judging a person solely on the one outfit we see him or her wear first would be simplistic. But can we deny the strength of our projected appearance, on others as well as on ourselves? In September 2015, in a much-commented gesture, the Chinese prime minister Xi

Second research stay: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA Any student of Egyptology would love to get lost in the MFA’s corridors and storage rooms, discovering the many faces of ancient Egyptians, statues and tomb reliefs unearthed by George A. Reisner at Giza. But Reisner didn’t only deploy his herculean prowess in Egypt: among his many archaeological endeavors, he also excavated some of the major sites of Sudanese and Nubian history, such as Kerma, Djebel

First research stay: German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Berlin For my first research stay, I didn’t go very far: just a one hour flight away from Copenhagen, in Berlin, Germany. My main objective was to study the textile tools discovered on the Meroitic town of Hamadab, in Central Sudan, excavated by the DAI team since 2002. Co-directed by Pawel Wolf and Ulrike Nowotnick, the mission has uncovered a large part of the town’s plan, revealing living

I have been very fortunate in the past few years to work with archaeologists who understand the potential of textile archaeology and accepted to communicate many of their data to me. I have also worked on great archives…and some less great, assembled in the first decades of Sudanese archaeology. But in this field, we are often reminded of the lesser status of textile activities in the mind of many of our predecessors: “If I devote

Nubia and Sudan, thanks to their hyper-arid climatic conditions, are favourable to the preservation of organic materials. The two regions are therefore a very fertile ground for textile studies, offering vast corpuses of well-preserved textiles, archaeobotanical remains of fibres, many spinning and weaving tools, as well as a large iconographic repertoire of people in various costumes. Taken as a whole, these different sources offer the rare chance to follow textile production from its very beginning

Welcome to TexMeroe! The project started a few weeks ago and I am finally ready to kick-start this blog. So…yes, I will be talking about texiles and Meroe. If you have been reading and already wonder “What or where the heck is Meroe?” then this post is for you. Generally, when I talk about my work, I start by saying words like “Nile Valley”, “Antiquity”, “funerary textiles”… and very quickly people ask if I work