Dr. Smiti Nathan

Transcript

Smiti: Welcome to Curiosity Meets the Past, a podcast for curious minds who love learning about the past. My name is Dr. Smiti Nathan, and I’m an archaeologist and your host.

In this episode, I’m speaking with archaeologist Dr. Siobhan Shinn, whose work focuses on a surprisingly rich artifact type found at archaeological sites in Egypt and Sudan. Siobhan first encountered this artifact type at the University College London, where she did her master’s work, and that early spark carried into her doctoral work at the University of Oxford.

So the artifact type that I’m alluding to is clay sealings. And if you’ve never heard of clay sealings before, you’re not alone.

These small, unassuming lumps of clay might not look like much at first glance, but they can reveal an extraordinary amount of information about past administrative systems, and even individuals.

In our conversation, Siobhan breaks down what a clay ceiling actually is and how she goes about studying them.

Siobhan starts us off by sharing why she studies these objects.

Siobhan: I think there are so many different facets of a clay sealing that a person can study as well as of course the object as a whole. Like you can do the inscriptions, you can do the materials, you can do the shapes and impressions, you can do the fingerprints. Being able to see an ancient person’s fingerprints really brings it home to me that these were people, you know, I mean, we know that, but it really is like the evidence right before you, it’s like, you know, someone made it, but then you see their fingerprint. It’s like they left their personal stamp on it, not only in the seal impression, but also with their fingerprint.

Um, and then I just think there’s so much opportunity with sealings.

Smiti: It certainly sounds like it. And if you don’t mind, can we step back for a quick second and can you walk us through the difference between a seal and a sealing

Siobhan: yes, and there is a big difference between a seal and a sealing. So a seal is a typically smaller object. Uh, it can be cylindrical, it can be in stamp form as a square or a shield, or in Egypt you have scarab seals and it was worn on an individual’s body, a sealer’s body as either a necklace or a ring or a bracelet.

And it was engraved with the sealers titles, epithets, sometimes their name, sometimes some other information. And then they use that seal to stamp clay sealings. So a clay sealing is essentially the ancient locking mechanism, clay sealings were used to locking secure ancient containers, shipping containers, storage containers, anything from baskets, wooden boxes, storeroom doors, ceramics, anything that might contain valuable goods.

Sealings can be used on both stationary objects, like to secure storage boxes and store room doors, but they were also used to secure objects that moved, so vessels that were, carrying wines or oils would be sealed and then shipped from the Levant to Egypt and like vice versa.

They were also used to secure, uh, papyrus letters.

You know, you don’t want anyone reading your letter. And again, they’re clay, so people can break into them. But the point is you will know if someone has broken into them and through the seal and the impression that the seal leaves on the clay sealing, you will know who was responsible for them. So you can have a little chat with that person about why the stuff’s getting broken into.

Smiti: Yeah, I can totally see or empathize with why ancient people or even modern people would want to have some type of locking mechanism or sealing mechanism when we think about our personal stuff or messages. Uh, but again, I am speculating here and you are the expert. So I was wondering if you could walk us through what you look for when you’re examining a clay sealing and what do you hope that might reveal?

Siobhan: there are four main attributes of a sealing that I look for or look at. The first is the seal impression, you know, which is the imprint of the seal. And again, it contains hieroglyphs, some sort of script. And then it can also contain different symbols. Sometimes hieroglyphs, like floating on their own, sometimes geometric patterns.

Oftentimes they will have a border around it, and you can look not only at the script itself and try to decipher it or translate it, but also at the shape. The seal left behind again, was it, oval? Was it scarab? Was it shield shaped, et cetera. And then also how many times there’s a seal impression, you know, once, twice, and that sort of thing.

And then the second thing I look at, actually there’s a couple. It’s the shape and the impressions of the reverse impressions, because these two things let you know, what kind of object it sealed and secured, so if you turn it over and you see wood grain, you’re gonna think, oh, it’s a wood box or a wooden door.

If you see, you know, the folds of fabric, you might think, oh, it’s a bag. you can imagine that perhaps a bag was tied with rope and then a seal was secured over it. So you’re gonna get the rope impression and the. fabric folds. Uh, the third thing I like to look at, is the material itself.

You know, what kind of clays and tempers are you dealing with? I’m also a ceramicist, so I tend to think of these as fabrics. Not quite accurate for sealing settings, but it’s the same idea, you know, what material were they using, and how plastic is it? How malleable is it? sealings were not fired, unlike other clay objects of the ancient world, which means it was, easier for them to just stick the sealing on an object and then kind of like shape it to the, to the object’s block or the object’s side, whatever it is that is being sealed.

And again, in my area, you often get clay sealings either made from Nile clays or desert clays. More commonly Nile clays, at least from the ones I’ve looked at. And then finally, you can look at fingerprints and this is something that I’m very excited about, but just beginning a study. So we’ll see how it goes.

Smiti: Gotcha. There’s a lot to dive into in each of these areas. I wanna talk a little bit about the material itself, and you mentioned it was unfired. So how does that preserve in the archeological record, especially where you’re working?

Siobhan: That’s a really good question. My experience is that it has preserved very well. You know, we get sites with thousands of clay sealings, so I looked at over a thousand clay sealings from Uronarti um, at my time at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. And I know that that’s only a part of it because some of the clay sealings were in Khartoum some of them, you know, there’s excavations going on, at Uronarti already currently, and they’re finding clay sealings.

Something that question makes me is that. Clay sealings, were not always, how do I put this? They are sometimes difficult to see when you’re excavating. They’re mud, right? You’re digging in mud. They are mud. So a lot of times it is believed that they have been missed.

Also, people will quite literally write in their reports that they were just clay lumps, you know? And so why keep them, why, you know, we’d mark ’em down, chuck them, and you’re like, maybe it would’ve been nice to have kept them, or at least document them in an organized fashion and then put them back if you don’t want to keep them, you know?

So the preservation of clay sealings is a very interesting topic. And of course, there are some examples of clay sealings that have been fired, not intentionally, but in a burning event. So. I’ve been very lucky enough to see some of the clay sealings that were excavated by George Reisner at Kerma.

And a few of those, they have this very like bright, like red brick color and they’re harder, and you are like, okay, I know that’s been fired, but they wouldn’t have put them on a door, for example, these are, these would’ve been door sealings and they wouldn’t have put them on a door and then like lit them because that’s very dangerous.

Might burn down the door, might burn down your storage. Like that’s not good. So they tended to just put ’em on. And then of course, if you are using a clay sealing as a lock on a frequent basis. If you put it on one day and then let’s say you put it on at night ’cause you finished your shift, you know, you were guarding the store room, everybody’s gone home for the day, you’re getting ready to leave, you put on your clay sealing, and then you leave.

But you come back the next morning, it’s gonna be a lot harder to take that clay sealing off if it’s been fired versus if it’s just, you know, a lump of clay and they take it off and they put it to the side. So yeah. Really, really interesting question.

Smiti: Thank you.

Siobhan: No one ever asked me about it. They’re like sealings of clay.

Smiti: Well, that’s what we’re here for on this podcast. And to transition to another question about how to look at clay sealings, you mentioned fingerprints and that this seems to be a relatively new field of study. Give us a brief overview of that.

Siobhan: The study of ancient fingerprints is called paleo-dermatoglyphics, kind of a mouthful. It’s a really interesting and sort of new-ish fields. Not very many people have used paleo-dermatoglyphics to study ancient fingerprints. To the best of my knowledge, it’s never been done with clay sealings, which is one of the reasons I wanna do a study of it.

But it has been used on ceramics and, fired clay figurines. And so there is some precedent for it with these materials. And there’s a lot of different things that I have to think through as I’m doing this, study. You know, everything from methods to interpretation. One of the things that I’m thinking about a lot is with clay sealings, if you have a narrowly complete clay sealing and there’s only one seal impression on it, you could be fairly comfortable saying, okay, this fingerprint probably belonged to the person who owned the seal.

Right? That kinda makes sense. But if you have. Even if you have a fairly complete clay sealing, but you have multiple different seal impressions whose fingerprinted, you know, whose fingerprint is it? Is it the person with the shield shaped seal impression or the oval shaped, you know, are they different people?

The current assumption is yes. Could they be the same person? Probably not, but maybe. So it’s, you have to think of all these things. And then I know something you’ve mentioned is considering how to talk about gender and biological sex and to make sure, you know, we wanna be respectful, we wanna make sure we’re not overlaying modern constructions on ancient people.

But I think for all these reasons it is really interesting to be able to, to talk about this and, and kind of get to, to individuals. Again, going back to something I said earlier, one of the reasons I like sealings is ’cause you have these fingerprints. Um. Actually a friend, a mutual friend of ours, Brooke Norton, I was talking to her about this and she brought up the idea that, you know, with some fingerprints, it looks like some people were very careful.

You know, they, they had their ball of clay and then they kind of took time to smooth it out and like, then they did their stamp and then they probably, you know, they applied it or whatever. And other people just kind of like chuck it on smooth a little bit, then stamp it. And she brought up the fact that like, this demonstrates different personalities.

And I think that’s fantastic. You know, at least in this one act, whether that was how they were feeling that day or that’s who they were as a person. But it’s just a little bit of personal insight that I absolutely find fascinating.

Smiti: That is absolutely fascinating and it’s funny what’s left behind as well. I personally wouldn’t want someone to judge me as a person based on, you know, the act of how I fold laundry or don’t fold laundry. I love these aspects of daily life that get us to essentially that individual in the past and, you know, how we might relate to them even if we don’t use, clay sealings now, or at least I don’t, they can reveal about us is absolutely fascinating. And you know, we’ve talked about the individual, but both you and I have used a theoretical framework that, you know, looks at communities and it’s called Communities of Practice. So I was wondering if you could give our listeners an overview of how you’re using Communities of practice and why you feel it’s important for the work you’re doing.

Siobhan: I always really love this question because. Every time I talk with scholars and researchers and people who apply this, in practice, in the field, everyone is a slightly different read on communities of practice. And so it’s so fun to just talk with people about it. But from my perspective, communities of practice is about, or is a framework, uh, that explores how people learn to practice as individuals in a community, even as they’re creating the styles and the norms and the innovations that define their practice.

And that will continue to define it in the future. This is how I see it. How do you see it?

Smiti: You know, I see it sometimes in a response to previous theoretical frameworks. For example, the chaîne opératoire, which is basically, you know, translated to like the chain of operation. And that was really, common or heavily used, I would say, in certain types of material studies. So if you’re looking at how a lithic artifact got made, or even how a pot got made, like what are the steps that you take to do that?

And what can we see in the archeological record of those steps? Now when it comes to learning, that is a little trickier and you know. Communities of practice could have just been the popular thing in the moment that, you know, I personally gravitated to. But it made me really think about learning and especially the social aspect of learning. So when we were reading the primary text that we learned about Communities of Practice from, which was, Lave and Wenger’s Situated Learning, we had a lot of conversations about apprenticeships and guild, to try to make sense of like, okay, well how are people learning? they were likely learning in a community. They were learning from people who had done whatever they were doing before. So that’s kind of how I envision it in my head. But when it comes to actually applying it, it’s a little trickier depending on what type of materials you have, but it is the kind of frame of mind that I think about when I am thinking of like, well, how were people learning, to make these objects or, you know, to make anything that we’re finding in the archaeological record and what can that potentially tell us?

Siobhan: I’m right there with you, I think learning is a very dynamic process. At least again, the way I see it, the way I think this theory supports is that, yeah, you learn from your surroundings, you learn from the people, you learn by being together. And yes, of course you do your own thing and you bring your own experiences to bear on it. And that’s, you know, important too. But yes, you’re in this community of people, especially like you said, for like a craft production. But I do think it does work in other instances too.

Smiti: And I just wanna let our listeners know when we’re talking about theory, we mean a lot of different things by that. But I wanna be clear that we’re not talking about a grand theory, a theory that explains anything and everything when we’re talking about theory, at least for me. There are many different definitions of it, but I think about the frameworks in which I, as a scholar or researcher am thinking about as I’m trying to interpret what I’m finding in what is often and almost always a fragmentary record. So I just wanna make that point very clear.

But let’s shift gears a little bit. We’ve been talking about the theoretical, and I’d love to dive into something a bit more tangible, which is clay sealings themselves. And if you could walk us through an example of a clay sealing that you studied that revealed something perhaps unexpected or fascinating to you.

Siobhan: Uh, so, okay, I’m gonna give a little background to the object, but when was this? Two years ago. So summer 2023, I was hired at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston to be their Terrace research associate for the summer.

So you do a lot of different things as Terrace research associate. You know, you’re in the department, you’re supporting the departmental work, you’re mostly dealing with visiting researchers, like helping them, you know, figure out what they need, sitting with them if they’re doing studies in the basement.

But one of the really cool things you also get to do is have your own project. So it’s very exciting, like get to be in a really like great museum with great people and doing your own research project. They knew I was an expert in sealings. You know, that my dissertation, even my master’s dissertation is related to clay sealings.

And so they told me about this little box they had and it was. A wooden box that had been in their department, in the department storage for over a hundred years, or maybe just about a hundred years. And it had never been unpacked. They knew what was in it because there was a written label on the top, but otherwise, you know, they peaked into it, couldn’t really see very much ’cause there was a lot of packaging.

But on the label it said mud sealings from Uronarti and so they basically said, Hey, here’s a box. You do sealings, let’s open it, let’s database it, you can study them. And so that was my project for the summer. It was really great because they hired me again to keep going as like a consultant, essentially an expert in clay sealings.

And I was able to not only look at the clay sealings in this box, but also. All of their clay sealings from Uronarti, Shalfak, and Mirgissa over a thousand clay sealings and did a whole database. I, I didn’t create a database. I logged it into TMS. For those who don’t know, TMS is the museum system. It’s the online recording system many museums have.

And then they allowed me to do a study of it. And one of the objects from Uronarti from this box, that had not been opened in forever was a clay sealing that, at first glance looked very normal. It had a seal impression on it. It was, you know, a smaller normal sealing. Looking at just the front, I thought I knew what it was.

I was like, oh, that’s a papyrus sealing. But I flipped it over and yes, it did have papyrus impressions on it, but it also had fabric impressions on it, and that very much surprised me. So the way it was is that it was a papyrus impression in the middle of the reverse surface and then fabric impressions on either side of it.

what I ultimately concluded was that this was a sealing that was applied to a papyrus letter or a papyrus document that had been folded and then wrapped in fabric, partially wrapped in fabric, and then together the fabric and the document were sealed. So that, that’s why you get both impressions. I’d never seen anything like that and I still haven’t, like I’ve looked at other, you know, sealing corpuses and I still haven’t seen anything like that.

And so it was a really, really good reminder for me to look closely at objects, even if you’ve looked at hundreds or thousands of objects, you still have to look again because they’re always gonna be a little bit different. So that was kind of, the story of the unopened box and one of my favorite clay sealings.

Smiti: That’s amazing and as a plant lover, and have a lot of people who enjoy the fiber arts, who listen to this podcast. I’m sure they’re thrilled to hear this example and just the complexity and diversity of what we can find in the archaeological record. You mentioned this a little bit already, that this example was a good personal reminder for you about, just keeping your eyes open for things that you might not normally notice or see. As we wrap up, I’m curious what you hope people take away from this conversation about clay sealing.

Siobhan: The one thing that I would love people to take away is that even though most or many clay sealings are lumps of clay that at first glance really don’t look that interesting to most people. They can still be very, very informative about many different aspects of the ancient world, different administrative systems, different production processes, different individuals.And so always give something a second glance and a second chance.

 Smiti: My biggest takeaway from this conversation is that there is so much potential for learning about the past through clay sealings, and the future is bright for this artifact type.

If you’d like to follow Siobhan’s work, you can find her on Instagram and on her website. Both of those links are linked below in the show notes along with the link to a full transcript of this episode.

And if you’d like to learn more about how Sudanese archaeologists are working to protect their cultural heritage amidst the current humanitarian crisis in Sudan, Siobhan discusses this in our Patreon bonus content. Our Patreon is free to join and gives you access to all of our extra content. If you’d like to support the podcast monetarily, we’d of course, appreciate that too. Thanks so much for listening and cultivating your curiosity with us. We’ll see you soon

Credits

Dr. Siobhan Shinn: Guest

Noor Hanania: Theme Music Creator

Laura Riveiro: Podcast Cover Art Creator

Smiti Nathan: Host, Video Editor

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