the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although their backgrounds and career paths were quite different in many respects, they shared two important characteristics. Both were able to devote themselves wholeheartedly to Egyptian archaeology primarily because of the considerable financial support they received from female benefactors (in Petrie’s case, the British novelist Amelia Edwards, and in Reisner’s case, the American philanthropist Phoebe Apperson), and both adopted single-minded and mold-breaking approaches to the survey and excavation of Egyptian sites.

At a time when methods of archaeological fieldwork were still in their infancy, the innovative methods of Petrie and Reisner set new standards for the discipline as a whole. For perhaps the only period in its history, Egyptian archaeology was at the forefront of the development of methodology, setting the pattern for excavations in Europe and America.

One of Petrie’s earliest archaeological publications was a metrological analysis ranging from the Giza pyramids in Egypt to Stonehenge in England (Petrie 1877). Although this was a somewhat multidisciplinary work compared with most of his later publications, its meticulous attention to detailed measurement and objective recording methods foreshadowed the rest of his career. By the time Petrie began to work in Egypt in the early 1880s, the motivation of many expeditions had switched from treasure hunting to the authentication of episodes in the Bible. Indeed, the Society for the Promotion of Excavation in the Delta of the Nile (an alternative name for the nascent Egypt Exploration Fund, or EEF) was dedicated to the search for “the documents of a lost period of Biblical history” in the delta region. Petrie was therefore appointed to excavate Tanis, Naukratis, Nabesha, and Defenna, all of which were situated in Lower Egypt.

In complete contrast to the conservative edouard naville (the other excavator employed by the EEF in the 1880s), Petrie immediately began to create a new style of fieldwork, paying close attention to every detail of the archaeological deposits rather than simply concentrating on the large monumental features of sites. Whereas his predecessors tended to clear large tracts of archaeological material relatively indiscriminately, Petrie dug selectively, excavating trenches in strategically selected parts of each site and thus building up an overall picture of the remains without destroying the entire site in the process. At El Amarna, for instance, he obtained a good overview of a complex urban site in a single season by excavating a range of different types of structures in various parts of the city.

The efficacy of Petrie’s methods was particularly evident in his excavations of the early dynastic royal cemetery at Abydos, which had already been despoiled by the French Egyptologist Emile Amelineau for several years. Petrie’s meticulous approach enabled him to build up a much clearer picture of the nature and sequence of the tombs, through both new excavation and the dissection of Amelineau’s spoil heaps, which contained numerous important small objects such as seal impressions and tiny fragments of ivory labels. Ironically, the same site was reexcavated by the deutsches archäologisches institut (German Archaeological Institute) during the 1980s and 1990s, and Petrie’s own spoil heaps yielded fresh evidence about this crucial period in Egyptian history.

Petrie’s long and fruitful career involved the survey and excavation of at least fifty Egyptian, Palestinian, and British sites, and the publication of numerous site reports, catalogues, and corpora of artifacts, but perhaps the most defining aspect of his work was his invention of the system of “sequence dating.” In 1890, he showed in his excavation of the complex stratigraphy of Tell el Hesy in Palestine that careful artifactual synchronisms could be made between the various strata and Egyptian historical phases. About ten years later, he applied the same basic process to the assemblages at predynastic cemetery sites, where the development of the site was horizontal rather than stratigraphic, which made the whole period difficult to date. His use of sequence dates, consisting initially of the matching up of many different slips of paper bearing the details of individual funerary assemblages, allowed him to assign relative dates to each grave within the predynastic cemetery at