not only the European/Mediterranean/African origin debate, but also the nature of cultural contacts and the specific phenomenon of colonialism, Maria Carmela Gatto, using logic to confront static cultural paradigms, has shifted her theoretical position to accommodate cultural and social complexity. This is not a new phenomenon: sound theorists from the politico-anthropological to psychoanalytical schools, such as Antonio Gramsci, Cheikh Anta Diop, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Frantz Fanon and Wilhelm Reich, devised alternative theoretical paradigms to combat the dominant traditional colonialist view, but the phenomenon is new to Egyptology. Because of its peculiar history, the South American school, with its ideological and methodological approach, is far more liberated in terms of ideological grounding. To close this segment, I quote Gatto extensively below:  
The definition of frontiers was for a long time based on a colonialist viewpoint with the expectation of sharp boundaries visible in cultural markers. Moreover, the colonists were seen as cultural innovators and the natives as passive recipients (Lightfoot and Martinez, 1995). This is often still the way we define the frontier between Egypt and Nubia and interpret the interaction between Egyptians and Nubians.  
The reconceptualization of frontiers as zones of cultural interface and fluidity in group affiliations is a new perspective in anthropological theory (Lightfoot and Martinez, 1995). The assumption is that frontiers are socially charged places where innovative cultural constructs are created and transformed. The fluidity of group affiliation in boundary areas may thus produce integrated new entities. In the present case, we should expect that the Egyptian and Nubian groups modified, created and syncretized emblemic elements, or cultural markers, to produce an integrated new entity in their culture contact situation (Gatto, 2009, pp. 124-127).