An Afternoon with Prof Paul Nicholson

Paul will be speaking on:

1.The Kerma Culture and excavations at P5 Sudan (Paul T. Nicholson with Steve Mills and Steve Porter)This paper will look at aspects of the Kerma culture of Sudan and consider the place of the rural settlement at site P5 of the Dongola Reach within that framework.  Rural sites have not generally been subject to excavation and this project was designed to examine an example.  The site is one of the last to be excavated by a foreign mission before outbreak of terrible civil war in Sudan, as a result the conclusions of the project must remain provisional.

2. Dating the Dead: Chronology and Context at Saqqara’s Sacred Animal Necropolis (Paul T. Nicholson with Henry Bishop-Wright)This paper will review the results of a recently completed project Dating the Dead: Chronology and Context at Saqqara’s Sacred Animal Necropolis which has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust and which has just been completed (March 2025). The project attempted to bring together the dating evidence for all those animal catacombs known from Saqqara and place them in a context such that it is possible to determine which ones were contemporary.  It also looks at the ways in which the animal cults may have operated an whether they might continue longer into to the Roman period than is usually thought.

Prof Paul Nicholson was awarded his PhD in archaeology at Sheffield University in 1987. He held several post-doctoral positions at Sheffield working on aspects of ancientEgyptian pottery before being appointed lecturer in archaeology at Cardiff University.  He is  Professor Emeritus in Archaeology in the School of History, Archaeology and Religion at Cardiff. His research interests include ancient technology, sacred animal cults and the uses and history of photography in archaeology and Egyptology.  His publications include The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt (with Ian Shaw), Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (co-edited with Ian Shaw), Brilliant Things for Akhenaten and Working in Memphis.  His book The Catacombs of Anubis at North Saqqara was  published by Peeters in association with the British Museum in 2021.  Along with his research assistant Dr. Henry Bishop-Wright he  is currently completing a volume Dating the Dead: chronology and context at Saqqara's Sacred Animal Necropolis.