Between the Contract and the Kin Workshop: Apprenticeship and Craft Reproduction in Roman Egypt (September 2026 – September 2027)
Apprenticeship is the mechanism through which craft economies reproduce themselves, yet most of it leaves no trace. This project asks under what conditions craft training becomes visible in the documentary and archaeological records, and what its absence can legitimately be taken to mean. Scholarship on ancient Egyptian craft has tended to read apprenticeship through the evidence that survived because it was institutionally privileged, above all the written contract; the project argues instead that apprenticeship and its visibility are decoupled, and that the spectrum between kin-embedded and contractual training is itself the signature of how crafts reproduced themselves. It brings three kinds of evidence into dialogue: the apprenticeship contracts and workshop documents of Roman Oxyrhynchus, the ethnographic record of contemporary Egyptian pottery communities, and the ancient Egyptian material of tomb scenes, training ostraca, and household papyri. Reading these against one another allows the project to ask which social arrangements produce a documentary or material trace, which do not, and what that means for how the archaeological record of craft should be interpreted.
Ahmad Mohammed is an archaeologist and ethnoarchaeologist whose work draws together Egyptology, African anthropology, and the anthropology of craft. He studies the social relations and spatial organisation of pottery workshops in Egypt, from ancient Egypt into the ethnographic present. He completed his PhD in Archaeology at Durham University in 2026 with a thesis on the spatial and social dynamics of Egyptian pottery workshops, built on sustained fieldwork with the potters of El-Nazlah in the Fayoum, who work in the anvil and hammer (Borah) hand-forming tradition, and on the documentary record of the Oxyrhynchus papyri. Combining excavation and material culture analysis with the ethnographic study of living workshops, he treats craft landscapes, the chaîne opératoire, and apprenticeship as social and spatial questions rather than purely technical ones. An emerging strand of his work asks what agent-based modelling can contribute to these questions, testing computationally how socially distinct forms of craft organisation can leave indistinguishable material traces.
His academic trajectory runs from teaching in Egypt, where he remains a Lecturer at Fayoum University, to doctoral research at Durham and heritage practice with the EAMENA Project, where as Project Coordinator he has worked on the documentation, digitisation, and monitoring of endangered archaeological sites across the Middle East and North Africa, and on training programmes in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. He has been Assistant Editor at World Archaeology (Taylor & Francis) and Shedet Journal since 2024, and was a member of the Sais Archaeological Mission. Alongside this he writes publicly on decolonial approaches to heritage and on the digital repatriation of dispersed collections through Entangled Heritage, the platform he founded and edits, and was an invited panellist on the ethics of manuscripts in contexts of conflict at the Weston Library, Oxford, in 2025.
Research areas: ethnoarchaeology and material culture; craft production, apprenticeship, and the transmission of technical knowledge; Egyptian settlement archaeology; Roman Egypt and the Oxyrhynchus documentary record; African anthropology; agent-based modelling and computational approaches to craft production; decolonial heritage practice and the digital repatriation of dispersed collections; remote sensing and GIS for heritage assessment.
Regions and periods: Egypt, with particular attention to the Fayoum and Middle and Upper Egypt, from ancient Egypt through the Ptolemaic and Roman periods and into the ethnographic present.
Languages: Arabic (native); English; Dutch (elementary, A1); Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs (elementary to intermediate).