Hello, and welcome to all who are reading this page! My name is Oren Siegel, and I am an Egyptian Archaeology PhD and GIS specialist on The Borderscape Project. I’m thrilled to introduce The Borderscape Blog, where I will provide regular updates on our work as well as some more in depth discussion of our team’s research. The plan is to update this space about once a week, with the disclaimer that deadlines and pandemics may necessitate some changes to this schedule. As a notoriously poor user of social media, I’m excited that this blog will allow me to showcase The Borderscape Project’s research in greater detail—with plenty of space to elaborate on challenging concepts. In some cases, we may even use this space to work through some particularly difficult ideas, and we always welcome input from our readers, whatever your academic interests or training! Other posts may be more technical, showing a look behind the curtain at the basic methods we are using to analyze and plot spatial data. Still other entries will focus on the personal research of the project’s team members. Most weeks, I will author these posts, but occasionally Maria or other colleagues from the Aswan-Kom Ombo Archaeological Project or the Institute of Mediterranean and Oriental Cultures at the Polish Academy of Sciences may author a post (or a series of posts) as well.
In the coming weeks, we will be discussing what exactly we mean by the term “borderscape”, and why we feel this word has considerable analytical potential when investigating the Aswan region in the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE. Hopefully, there will also be time to discuss some of the recent theoretical developments in anthropology, geography, political science, and archaeology that can inform the study of ancient borders. In future months, we will showcase the kinds of data that we are working with in our study, how we are organizing this information, and preview some of our findings.
