Tying Technology to Social, Economic, and Political Change: The Case of Bread Molds at Elephantine, Egypt

Egyptian pottery—like the pottery from most excavations—is often prized as a chronological indicator above all else. Pottery thus becomes reified into apparently standard corpora by period, an impression reinforced by ceramic comparison and cross-dating across sites. Using data from select contexts at one Egyptian settlement site (Elephantine Island) and one specific ceramic form (the bread mold), this article argues that such an approach oversimplifies the ceramic record, ignoring localizing tendencies, continuities between periods, and the entanglement of the material record with long-lived social structures and patterns. Elephantine bread molds show technological continuity and change that does not move in lockstep with greater political changes, thus providing a window into local systems and the value of a regional approach to ceramics.