in southern Egypt, and when completed, it was destined to flood nearly 100 miles of the Nile Valley. The threatened region was politically a part of Egypt, but ethnically and historically it was the most northerly part of Nubia (usually called lower Nubia), a land whose culture and history had always been different from those of Egypt. In anticipation of the threatened destruction of archaeological sites, the Egyptian director-general of antiquities persuaded the Egyptian Survey Department to undertake the Archaeological Survey of Nubia and invited Reisner to be its director. It was, in fact, the world’s first major archaeological salvage campaign.

The Archaeological Survey of Nubia was active from 1907 to 1911. Reisner served as its director only in the first season, 1907–1908, but during that time he developed the field methodology that was to be followed in all subsequent seasons as well as by later expeditions in Nubia for almost half a century. The expedition confined its attention almost wholly to cemetery sites, bypassing town sites, because they mostly appeared to be of recent date, and bypassing temples, which were later to be studied by epigraphic specialists. In the excavation of graves, however, Reisner was thorough and systematic. Encountering almost at once the remains of several previously unsuspected Nubian cultures, he developed a chronological sequence for them that has generally stood the test of time, as well as typologies of the various grave and pottery types encountered.

Most important, he introduced for the first time the use of standard recording forms in the field to replace the unsystematic daily diary that was the usual method of documentation among Egyptologists. During the course of a brief return to Harvard in 1908, Reisner gave a course in archaeological field methods, based mainly on his Nubian experiences. It was attended by alfred v. kidder, sylvanus morley, and other budding American archaeologists, who later credited Reisner with teaching them the use of standardized recording procedures.

The directorship of the Archaeological Survey convinced Reisner that a rich and largely unexplored field of investigation was awaiting the archaeologist in Nubia. In 1913, therefore, he began a series of excavations that would eventually encompass nearly all of the most monumental sites in the more southerly portion of Nubia, which then lay within Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Over a period of twenty years, the Harvard-Boston Expedition excavated the great early Nubian necropolis of Kerma; most of the huge brick fortresses that Egyptian pharaohs had built in Nubia; a complex of Kushite temples at Napata; and all of the royal tombs of the Kushite monarchs and their queens, both at Napata and at Meroe. This work resulted in the development of a chronological framework that is still basic to the understanding of Nubian prehistory and history.

Notwithstanding the monumental importance of his work in Nubia and the Sudan, Reisner’s first love was apparently always Egypt. The Harvard-Boston Expedition ceased its activities in the Sudan after 1932 but continued at Giza until the director’s death a decade later. The Giza excavations were models of excavation methodology and recording for their time, and they furnished the enormously rich Egyptian collections that are now found in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The single most spectacular discovery was the tomb of Hetapheres, the mother of Khufu of Great Pyramid fame. Given the amount that was already known about Egyptian archaeology and history, however, Reisner’s overall contribution in this field was not on the same scale was his work in the Sudan, where his name and work still stand preeminent.

Reisner’s fieldwork and his publications exhibit a concern for systematics that was decidedly rare for his time. He developed not only a chronological sequence for the prehistoric Nubian cultures that he had first discovered but also a detailed chronology for all of the seventy-odd rulers of the empire of Kush, and for their queens, based mainly on the typological study of their royal tombs. In Egypt also he worked out the early development of tomb types, again based on seriational methods. Although there have been some subsequent modifications in these schemes, their major outlines remain unchallenged. For each of the culture periods that