Moche–Chan Chan project directed by Michael Moseley and the Ayacucho botanical project under the direction of Richard MacNeish. Looting of the rich, accessible coastal sites continues, despite international efforts to stop it, and like the drug trade, it will almost certainly continue as long as there is a market in North America and Europe for Peruvian antiquities.

J. Scott Raymond

References

Burger, Richard. 1989. “An Overview of Peruvian Archaeology: 1976–1986.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 37–69.

Isbell, William, and Gordon McEwan. 1991. “A History of Huari Studies and Introduction to Current Interpretations.” In Huari Administrative Structure: Prehistoric Monumental Architecture and State Government, 1–17. Ed. W. Isbell and G. McEwan. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks.

Rowe, John Howland. 1954. Max Uhle, 1856–1944: A Memoir of the Father of Peruvian Archaeology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Petrie, Sir William Matthew Flinders

(1853–1942)

William Matthew Flinders Petrie’s father, William Petrie, was a civil engineer, and his mother was the daughter of the explorer Matthew Flinders. Delicate as a child, Petrie was educated at home in England and showed early precocity in science and mathematics. As a boy he collected Greek and Roman coins, and in his teens and early twenties made triangulation surveys of earthworks and hill forts and, with his father’s help, measured Stonehenge. His first visit to Egypt was in 1880. Living in a rock tomb and undertaking, almost single-handedly, a survey of the entire pyramid field, Petrie’s meticulous measurement of the interior of the Great Pyramid disproved a current theory that it had been built under divine inspiration.

In 1884, Petrie was employed by the recently formed egypt exploration society (then the Egypt Exploration Fund; EEF) to dig for that group. For his excavations of Tanis (1884) and Naucratis and Daphnae (1885–1886) he adopted an entirely new approach to Egyptian archaeology. Excavators had hitherto employed forced-labor gangs, driven by overseers, and had been concerned only with recovering monumental pieces, inscribed blocks, and museum exhibits—everything else was discarded. Petrie chose and supervised his own workforce, rewarding workers for their finds—which otherwise might have gone to dealers.

Maintaining that pottery was a key to the age of a deposit, and that much could be learned from hitherto discarded objects even if broken, he began to assemble his own collection, the nucleus of what was to become a teaching museum. From 1888 to 1890 he dug in the Fayyum in Lower Egypt, penetrating the pyramids of Illahun and Hawara. Among his finds were many mummy portraits of the Roman period and a workmen’s village with a wealth of domestic objects. In June 1890 he excavated Tel el Hesy for the Palestine Exploration Fund, and for the first time he dated strata of occupation by the pottery, some of which he was familiar with from Egypt. Back in Egypt, important finds at Meydum (1891) and Tell el amarna (1892) brought him his first honorary doctorate.

As a result of the will of Amelia Edwards, founder of the EEF and a novelist who had been his friend and supporter, Petrie became the occupant of the first Chair of Egyptology in Great Britain, at University College, London, in 1892. He was expected to excavate in Egypt every winter, training students in archaeological method. With his first student, James Quibell, he found archaic statuary of a hitherto unknown type at Coptos in 1893. The next year they dug the first predynastic cemetery in Egypt (later Petrie was to devise a chronological sequence for the graves by a remarkable statistical method of his own). After three years in abydos (1900–1904), where he excavated the royal tombs of the earliest dynasties, and a winter in the copper-mining area of Sinai, he left the EEF’s employment for the second time and founded the British School of Archaeology in Egypt. His wife, Hilda, whom he married in 1896, was his constant companion and right hand in the field, and she labored at home to raise funds and find new subscribers for their work; their camps, run on a shoestring, were a byword for spartan living.