from cemetery N7000 have provided modern researchers with an extremely reliable anthropological database.

Although the achievements of Petrie and Reisner are comparatively well documented, there was another phase in the development of Egyptian archaeology that has received less attention. In the period between the two world wars, several field-workers in Egypt began to undertake projects that would now be described as experimental and ethno-archaeological. Reginald Engelbach, for instance, undertook a number of experiments in the study of stone procurement and processing (Engelbach 1923) while Winifred Blackman, the wife of the British Egyptologist A.M. Blackman, published a study of Egyptian peasants (Blackman 1927) that was distinctly innovative in its approach to the links between modern and ancient Egyptian culture. These methodological advances, however, were to be thoroughly eclipsed by the discovery of new spectacular treasures by archaeologists howard carter at Thebes and Pierre Montet at Tanis.

In 1922, Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Pharaoh tutankhamun, almost exactly a century after Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphs, opened the floodgates in terms of public appreciation and exploitation of ancient Egypt. Archaeology as a whole attracts a level of popular interest not usually associated with other, more deskbound disciplines such as physics or mathematics, and the study of ancient Egypt has a particularly strong grip on the popular imagination. Even before the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, nineteenth-century poets and novelists, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Sir Rider Haggard, were presenting a romanticized view of Pharaonic Egypt that drew heavily on new information provided by adventurers and archaeologists.

There are no doubt many theses that might be written on the impact of Carter’s discovery on the popular culture of Europe and America, but from a purely Egyptological point of view, it might be argued that it was something of a mixed blessing. Although both Petrie and Reisner had made other sensational discoveries at certain points in their careers, their principal achievement had been to establish Egyptology as a rigorous scientific discipline concerned with the pursuit of knowledge rather than objets d’art. Yet in one fell swoop, the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb restored the popular view of Egypt as a treasure hunters’ paradise in which sheer persistence might eventually be richly rewarded (after the initial euphoric days, Carter was to spend much of his life cataloging the funerary equipment he had discovered in the tomb). Egyptologists have since been dogged by a public willing them to find something even more exciting than an intact royal tomb, and they have often found that their scientific agenda is at odds with the popular desire for buried treasure. The other side of the coin, however, is the continued existence of a wide audience for Egyptological research, which helps to maintain a subject that might otherwise be a vulnerable minority discipline.

Settlement Prehistory and the “Nubian Campaign”: New Directions in Egyptian Archaeology

Most of the work accomplished by archaeologists in Egypt between the mid-nineteenth century and World War II was characterized by two distinct trends. First, the early work in particular was marked by a resolutely art-historic, object-oriented approach to the excavated data. Second, fieldwork was dominated by a preference for the study of religious and funerary architecture rather than the artifacts and architecture of daily life. Both of these tendencies effectively inhibited the intellectual development of Egyptian archaeology until the 1960s when two major influences—the study of the prehistory of the Nile Valley and the increased excavation of pharaonic towns—finally began to exert an influence on the subject as a whole.

Certain town sites had already been investigated by the travelers, antiquarians, and pioneering archaeologists of the early nineteenth century such as Sir John Gardner Wilkinson and Robert Hay. In 1826, for example, Wilkinson made a detailed survey of the Greco-Roman port of Berenice on the Red Sea, which had been discovered a few years earlier by Giovanni Belzoni. Both Wilkinson and Erbkam (Lepsius’s