An Elite Bronze Age Woman Buried Alongside An Ostrich Fan Shows The Oldest Evidence Of Head Strap Use
Around 4,000 years ago, Bronze Age women in Nubia used tumplines, a form of head strap that can hold a basket, to carry goods and young children on their heads. Their skeletons are evidence of the earliest known use of head straps in the world.
Researchers examined the remains of 30 people (16 males and 14 females) buried in a Nubian Bronze Age cemetery in Sudan.
One of them was an elite woman who died at around the age of 50. She showed the strongest signs of wearing a head strap through the marks on her body.
The research team, led by Jared Carballo-Pérez, a researcher of bioarchaeology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, investigated the archaeological site of Abu Fatima, which contains a cemetery located next to the third cataract of the Nile River. The area used to be the ancient kingdom of Kush.
After analyzing the burials of the 30 individuals in the Abu Fatima cemetery, the team discovered that the women tended to have more wear on their head and neck areas compared to the male skeletons. This suggested that the women were carrying heavy loads with head straps.
“Women exhibited specific degenerative changes in the cervical vertebrae and skull areas associated with prolonged use of tumplines that transfer weight from the forehead to the upper back,” wrote the team.
The cemetery was about six miles north of Kerma, the capital city of Kush. According to the researchers, Kerma was a “densely populated urban center.”
It was home to many different kinds of facilities, such as storage buildings, ritual structures, bakeries, breweries, and defensive walls.
It is likely that the women in Kerma and the surrounding region carried goods and young children with head straps based on the skeletal analyses. The team also looked at ancient Egyptian art that depicted Nubians who were alive around that time.
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“The forehead straps would be attached to the basket and placed over the top of the head. This is supported by various depictions of Nubian women found in tribute scenes from 18th Dynasty Theban tombs,” wrote the team.
The elite woman with the most obvious signs of head strap use lived sometime between 2600 and 2000 B.C. Her body was laid to rest with a leather pillow and ostrich feather fan.
Her identity is unknown, but the funerary objects buried with her indicate that she had a higher status than most others in her community.
Even though she was one of the elites, she still had to bear heavy loads on her head. In addition, an isotopic analysis of her remains reveals that she was from outside of the region but still within the kingdom of Kush. Today, people still use tumplines in rural areas in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The study was published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
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