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During the 1914–1918 war, Petrie remained in London arranging and partly cataloging his museum. This large collection, augmented every year by objects found or bought in Egypt, had been bought by University College in 1913. As the Petrie Museum, it is today a teaching collection without rival. In 1920, Petrie returned to Egypt to dig for a few years more; in 1926, he moved his work to Palestine, where he excavated between 1926 and 1934 three large tells near the Egyptian frontier. In 1934, at the age of eighty-one, he retired from the chair at University College and two years later went to live in Jerusalem, where he died. He had dug over 50 sites and written over 100 books and over l,000 articles and reviews. He held five honorary doctorates, was made a fellow of both the Royal Society (1902) and the British Academy (1904), and was knighted in 1923.

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sir william matthew flinders petrie

(Image Select)

Margaret S. Drower

Peyrony, Denis

(1869–1954)

Originally a school teacher, Denis Peyrony became the excavator of major French Paleolithic sites such as la Ferrasie, laugerie haute, and le moustier. Peyrony used a version of the type-fossil approach to lithic classification to establish relative chronologies in French stone tool technology, which did not always accord with the linear evolutionary sequences proposed by édouard lartet and gabriel de mortillet. Indeed, Peyrony’s argument that the Aurignacian and the Perigordian lithic traditions were contemporaneous was a major step toward identifying the existence of geographical (if not “cultural”) variability in Paleolithic technologies.

Tim Murray