Robert James Vigar

ROBERT VIGAR, then a graduate student at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, received funding in October 2019 to aid research on ‘My World, My Earth is a Ruin: Dispossession, Repossession and Archaeological Practice in Egyptian Nubia,’ supervised by Dr. Robert Leventhal. This project considers how archaeological site looting is conditioned by processes of dispossession, which continue to endure for the Nubian population of Egypt, and the role that archaeological practice has in furthering Nubian dispossession. Through an investigation of the relationship between Nubian communities and archaeological fieldwork over the course of 130 years, this project will demonstrate the ways in which archaeology has been implicated in the project of dispossession in Nubia. Archival data gathered from Egypt, Germany, and the UK, as well as 19 semi-structured interviews with archaeologists and local community members, provide evidence for the development of a regime of archaeological knowledge production which has insisted upon Nubia as a liminal space of difference, as an archaeological, military, and racialized frontier zone. Ultimately, this project argues that archaeology is an infrastructure of dispossession for indigenous people.