Encounters, Affects and Intra-actions: Difracting the Theban Tomb 123

• Published in: Archaeologies Vol. 18; no. 2; pp. 338 - 369
• Main Author: Pellini, José Roberto
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 2022; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Anthropology; Archaeology; Cultural Heritage; Data collection; Social Sciences; Barad; Diffraction; Ontological Turn; Egypt
• ISSN: 1555-8622; 1935-3987
• DOI: 10.1007/s11759-022-09451-4

In archaeology, the methods of data collection, analysis and interpretation, at least in the most traditional and hegemonic currents, are marked by the idea that the world is composed of individual entities, each one with specific and separated properties. In order to question this model, I will use the concept of Diffraction proposed by Haraway and Barad, to understand how different encounters over time actualized Theban Tomb 123, located in the plain of Sheikh Abdel Qurna, in Luxor, Egypt. The first encounter to be analysed is the encounter between Amenemhet with TT123 in the Pharaonic period (1479–1425 BC). The second involves encounters between TT123 with Qurnawis, a community that between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries used the pharaonic tombs on the West Bank of Luxor as housing. Finally, I will analyse the encounters between archaeologists with TT123. Thinking about these different encounters shows us that this space that archaeologists call TT 123, rather than being a fixed materiality, is a transitory materiality and meeting point of different ontologies.