Sergio Alarcón Robledo’s 2025 Harvard Horizons project, “Entangled Ritual and Architectural Practices at North Saqqara,” explores ancient Egyptian architecture through an interdisciplinary approach that sits at the crossroads of archaeology, Egyptology, and architecture.
2025 Harvard Horizons Scholar Sergio Alarcón Robledo explores ancient Egyptian architecture through an interdisciplinary approach that sits at the crossroads of archaeology, Egyptology, and architecture. By inquiring about the sensorial experiences of the past, the PhD student in Near Eastern languages and civilizations at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences seeks to understand why ancient funerary structures changed and evolved into monumental buildings. Collaborating with experts from Stanford University, Alarcón Robledo employed acoustic analysis to unravel how these ancient spaces would have shaped sound and, consequently, the human interactions that took place within them.
It may seem like, as archeologists excavate, we uncover the past. But what I see coming out of the ground is way messier than any history book that you have ever read. What you see on the screen is the site of North Saqqara in Egypt, which was the main elite cemetery of Memphis, close to modern Cairo, at the time of the state formation. That is roughly 3,000 to 2,600 BCE.
This site was the subject of intensive excavations in the 20th century that uncovered hundreds of tombs, way more tombs than any archeologist could possibly analyze in a lifetime. And archeologists had to choose. They chose the best preserved, the largest ones, or the structures that served their own questions. Based on these structures, archeologists built historical narratives, hoping to understand how and why ancient Egyptian civilization developed to shape some of the most monumental buildings ever known, like the famous Giza pyramids.
In constructing these narratives, archeologists understood the construction process as the means to obtain an end product that was ready to be used. And it is this end product that they compared to the end products of other structures and then putting them in a historical narrative.
History is not uncovered. It is written. And my job as an archeologist is to challenge these narratives and test them against new evidence. In my dissertation, I have studied the tombs of North Saqqara in detail, and I have realized that the reality is a little bit more complicated. These tombs were built for a purpose, and they were used for rituals, yes. But they were later transformed as new needs arose for other rituals, like the funerals. And yet, they were further transformed to provide space for what we call post-mortem cult.
But even this scheme of successive phases of construction and use is an oversimplification. Buildings are like people, and writing about their history is very much like writing their biography. In our lives, there may be many moments which are representative of our identities, like, for example, my graduation hopefully coming in a few weeks. But even freezing one moment of every day of our lives would not be representative of what living looks like. We live our lives in a much more fluid and dynamic way. And that is precisely how I like to think about buildings, as fluid entities that change constantly. Specifically, I'm interested in understanding how the lives of buildings and the lives of people intertwine and shape each other.
This is no easy task, or at least not for North Saqqara, because it has been a long time since these buildings were built and used and transformed and used again and eventually abandoned. In 1930, a British archeologist arrived to North Saqqara and started excavating the outline of these structures. He unfortunately passed away too soon and could not publish much of his work, and another archeologist came in a few years later. His name was Walter Bryan Emery.
Emery undertook much more systematic excavations of the site and discovered those hundreds of tombs that I was talking about earlier. But archeology does not happen in a vacuum, and his work was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, and then he had problems finding a job. And long story short, he could not pay the attention that he would have liked to these tombs, and many of them remained unpublished and unknown to the scientific community. And actually, the plan of the site is still unknown. We don't know where it is. It's lost.
And here is where I came. I arrived to North Saqqara in 2023, and I realized that Emery never backfilled the tombs that he excavated. Actually, the tombs had only been covered by wind blown sand. This means that the topography of the site reflects the structures that lie underneath. I placed a camera on top of a pole and walked the landscape, taking thousands of photographs, which I then used to create three dimensional models of the landscape as it looks today. This was done through a technique called digital photogrammetry.
These models allowed me to find traces of those structures, which I then compared with the documents of Emery, and I found matches. This has been a long process, but it has allowed me to find the location of many of those tombs that had been lost for so many years. And actually, I have been able to reconstruct a large portion of that lost plan of the site. Using this data, I am building renderings of how these structures would have looked like in the past, which allow me to wonder about how the people who walked the landscape in the past would have perceived it. What did they see? What did they hear?
In collaboration with a team of experts in digital acoustics from Stanford University, I am bringing sound sources to my three-dimensional models, and we are analyzing how those sounds would be heard from specific listening positions. For instance, we are placing speakers outside of the tombs and realizing that their voices could be barely audible inside of the burial chambers.
In the end, I'm trying to understand these tombs in the same way that archeologists who find the remains of this very theater in a few thousand years will be able to tell that the people who once used those benches where you are sitting were able to see me and that you were able to listen to me. Today is just one more day in the life of this building, and our lives happen to intertwine with it. I invite you to reflect on how the design of this space is affecting your experience of this event. From my perspective, I can assure you that I shall never forget having had the privilege of presenting my work in such a wonderful place. Thank you very much.