Material Culture and Texts of Graeco-Roman Egypt: Creating Context, Debating Meaning

The archaeology of Graeco-Roman Egypt and its sister-discipline papyrology were born together from the same colonial stew of illicit and sanctioned excavations that produced massive quantities of papyri and artifacts from Egypt during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1920's, a small number of researchers began to record findspots and stratigraphic levels for the artifacts that were added to the collections of their respective institutions and to produce cohesive syntheses of the papyri and other objects brought out of Egypt. The following decades, however, were marked by processual trends that solidified methodological and philosophical divides between the two disciplines as each sought to define its role in the creation of knowledge about Egypt's Graeco-Roman past. The disciplinary divide became more pronounced, so that, by the 1990's, much of the cross-disciplinary dialogue consisted of accusations of neglect for the concerns of the other field. In this paper, we address the sources of this divergence through historiographic analysis and consider interdisciplinary commonalities by exploring the mutual concern with the contextualization of papyri and artifacts. In particular, we address the spatial, temporal, ideational and textual considerations that papyrologists and archaeologists employ in their search for meaning and interpretive frameworks, as well as the investigative ramifications of objects and texts that have been stripped of their physical context. Throughout our discussion, we regard context as not merely the recognition of physical association and patterns, but as part of an investigative apparatus for creating and debating meaning within both disciplines.