Previous investigations of Egyptian imperialism have focused principally on the policies of pharaoh and his close advisors to the exclusion of other data. But archaeological evidence indicates that Egyptian frontier communities did more than simply implement central policy. In this paper, I present an analysis of cooking and serving assemblages from the Nubian fortress of Askut that illustrates the role of individual agency in the day to day cross-border interactions that characterized frontier life. The study demonstrates that Egyptians and Nubians collaborated and may have intermarried in spite of a politically charged ideology of separate identities and otherness.