Digging It: Archeology in Egypt

[mint...@hotmail.com]

http://www.wrmea.com/archives/December_2008/0812069.html

Digging It: Archeology in Egypt


AT AN OCT. 6 presentation at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington,
DC, Dr. Mark Lehner, director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates
(AERA), discussed archeological endeavors in Egypt “as cultural
capacity building.” More specifically, his lecture focused on how
archeology in Egypt opens the door to exchanges between Egyptians and
foreigners.

Beginning his remarks with a dreamlike photograph of the Pyramids of
Giza, Lehner noted that just as “in the popular imagination there’s
kind of a fog around the pyramids, as far as who built them and why,”
there also is a “fog that surrounds the contemporary Middle East” for
many Westerners.

The scholar has excavated in Egypt for over 30 years, producing the
only scaled maps of the Giza Sphinx. His more recent focus has been on
uncovering the lost city that would have housed the 20,000 to 30,000
pyramid workers.

Under Lehner’s direction, the American Research Center in Egypt’s
(ARCE) field school receives financial support from a USAID Egyptian
Antiquities Conservation grant, among other international cultural
philanthropic and academic organizations. While he considers the field
school as “cultural capacity building from the bottom-up”—that being
the “robustness behind all successful business organizations”—Lehner
acknowledged that the support from the top-down “allows us to be
successful, to make change.”

ARCE works with the Egyptian system, explained Lehner, who has a
longstanding working relationship with Dr. Zahi Hawass, secretary-
general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. When an excavation
takes place in Egypt, Lehner said, an Egyptian inspector is assigned
to the project by law. However, he added, they are “there for a legal
reason, but they are not very empowered.” The Egyptian inspectors
usually graduated from Cairo University with a monument degree, or a
focus on Egyptology as art history, Lehner said, meaning they had
little hands-on practice in contemporary archeological practices.
Through ARCE, Egyptian inspectors are rotated in to work side-by-side
with contract archeologists from around the world and the field
school’s local students.

An interdisciplinary approach is being taken in reconstructing the
lost city [of Giza], using the standards of “settlement archeology,”
which examines not only sediment layers, but pottery remains, bone
fragments, plant remains, and so on. This approach enables the
archeologists to reconstruct what life would have been like for the
builders of the Giza pyramids, right down to their food sources.

Unfortunately, Lehner lamented, although his field school observes the
strictest of excavation rules, it more frequently is the case that
“information is being destroyed all over Egypt” due to inexperience
and inadequate practice.

In an effort to counter this trend, the ARCE field school has
published manuals and offers a rigorous lecture series nightly, along
with tutorials and exams, so that the students and inspectors who
graduate are fully equipped.

Many of the inspectors, who already are in charge of overseeing
excavations, go on to provide lectures in Arabic about what they
learned at ARCE, which Lehner described as the largest mission in Giza
that is so international in scope. In fact, ARCE’s holiday card had to
be written in 15 languages—including Japanese, Turkish, Swedish,
Norwegian, French, English and Arabic.