 The technical limitations of previous work in the Valley had prompted an early and easy decision within ARTP: to replace the outmoded process of ‘clearance’ - little more than a digging of holes, tracing of ground-plans and collection of easily salvageable artefacts - with a far more thorough, multidisciplinary methodology.
It will come as a shock to some to discover that truly scientific archaeology has been such a long time coming in Egypt - and as Egyptian sites go the Valley of the Kings is more behind than most. The situation is changing, with some of the best archaeologists in the world now at work in the Nile Valley; but it remains a sobering fact that at many sites the old, amateurish techniques practised at the start of the twentieth century are still in common use a hundred years later. It has to be emphasized that Egyptology and archaeology are not one and the same thing; that most Egyptologists don’t have any formal training in archaeological technique, nor do they even employ formally trained archaeological staff. And since archaeology is something they have traditionally tended to pick up from their Egyptologist-predecessors bad habits are perpetuated longer here than in most other countries.
In consequence, in the Valley of the Kings the complexities of survey, stratigraphic excavation and specialist sampling receive scant attention even today. It is a site also where the physical nature of archaeologically significant fragments commonly passes unrecognized through a quite frightening lack of familiarity with the ancient material; and where less imposing scraps perceived by the digger as ‘uncontexted’ - in a closed site where any such concept ought to be alien - can still be written-off as unworthy of serious study or even retention. The loss to knowledge has been great.
|
ARTP was to work very differently. Our team boasted many well-known archaeological names - senior staff eventually to include Dr David Aston and Dr Bettina Bader (of the Austrian Archaeological Institute), Ed Johnson (UCLA), Mohsen Kamel (UCLA, mainstay of Mark Lehner’s work at Giza), Prof. Jiro Kondo (Waseda University, Tokyo), Dr Peter Lacovara (Michael C Carlos Museum, Atlanta), Prof. Geoffrey Martin (Christ’s College, Cambridge), Dr Mary Anne Murray (Institute of Archaeology, London), Shin’ichi Nishiyama (Institute of Archaeology, London), Dr Catharine Roehrig (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Will Schenck (Chicago House, Luxor), Dr Ian Shaw (Liverpool University), and Ana Tavares (Institute of Archaeology, London - another Lehner team member). Under this staff a determined application of modern survey, excavation and recording techniques and the closest possible study of materials recovered resulted in a burgeoning of the site’s information-yield; and as our area of work expanded the potential of the Valley as a whole became increasingly apparent.
By the end of our first season in 1998 it was obvious just how far from exhausted the Valley of the Kings actually was, prompting us to reassess not only traditional assumptions of the site’s supposedly limited potential but also our own future strategy. Nefertiti remained a very real goal and a useful peg on which to hang ARTP’s publicity and fund-raising efforts. But it was becoming obvious that within the Valley’s rubble fill a much more vital legacy had been preserved - and it was clear to us that it was this larger issue which needed to be given priority.
(Continued)
(19/03/2006)
|
|