in a variety of locations throughout Egypt and Nubia. The houses and living conditions of the Egyptians are still underrepresented, compared with their tombs and temples, but considerably more evidence from urban sites is now available in the form of a relatively unsynthesized collection of examples.

Table 1. Proportions of Published Archaeological Fieldwork (1924–1990)
Publication Monumental Funerary Religious Non–monumental Cemetery Settlement Survey
1924 34.1 20.7 30.5 13.4 1.0
1981 36.2 13.0 8.7 23.2 15.9
1982 34.6 17.9 11.5 17.9 17.9
1989–1990 27.8 16.7 5.6 44.4 5.6
Source: All details except those for 1989–1990 are taken from D. O’Connor, “Egyptology and Archaeology: An African Perspective,” in A History of African Archaeology, ed. P. Robertshaw (London: J. Currey, 1990).The data for 1924, 1981, 1982, and 1989–1900 are derived from Pratt (1925), Zonhoven (1985), Leclant (1983), and Hovestreydt and Zon–hoven (1992), respectively.

The UNESCO-backed Nubian Salvage Campaign of the 1960s injected a new vigor and urgency into the archaeology of Egypt, but it was the use of innovative techniques by prehistorians—cannibalizing other subjects such as geography, geology, and anthropology—that provided a new toolkit for the study of settlements, whether of the Paleolithic, Pharaonic, or Roman period. The long-neglected study of preliterate Egypt provided the ideal testing ground for techniques of purely archaeological analysis and interpretation in such projects as the excavation and survey of Epipaleolithic remains at Elkab (Vermeersch 1970) and the study of areas of predynastic settlement at Hierakonpolis (Fairservis 1972; Hoffman 1979, 155–164). This type of new fieldwork laid the foundation for more general interpretative works, such as Karl Butzer’s groundbreaking study of man-land relationships in the Nile Valley (Butzer 1976).

Michael Hoffman (1979, xvii–xviii) has outlined the differences between traditional Egyptologists and prehistorians: “Although we share with historians a fundamental interest in reconstructing man’s past, prehistorians have to depend much more on the often unimpressive scraps of material evidence discarded by our ancestors in their camps, towns, cemeteries and garbage heaps.” Seen in this light, prehistorians and settlement archaeologists in Egypt have a great deal in common. However, there is one major difference between prehistoric and settlement-oriented archaeology in Egypt. Whereas the prehistoric sites of the Nile Valley lie in an intellectual vacuum, the settlement archaeologist’s analysis of material culture can be supplemented (and occasionally contrasted) with the very different types of textual information provided by contemporary inscriptions, papyri, and ostraca. The challenge of historical archaeology in Egypt is to synthesize the broad patterns of material culture with the existing historical, textually based framework of events, dates, and personalities (see, for example, Kemp 1984; Shaw 1992).

When less information was available about Egyptian towns, there was a frequent tendency to make generalized comparisons across many hundreds of years and between different functional types of settlement in diverse geographical locations so that, for instance, a Middle Kingdom pyramid town such as Kahun might be compared in detail with a late New Kingdom “harim-town” such as Gurob. Undoubtedly there is evidence to suggest a certain degree of continuity in Egyptian urban planning from the Old Kingdom to the late period, but the routine and indiscriminate comparison of towns and villages separated by several centuries tended to result in a blurred picture in which the particular cultural, chronological, and geographical contexts of settlements were neglected. Such was the dearth of evidence in the 1940s that H.W. Fairman proposed an analogy between social patterning in Old Kingdom cemeteries and that of towns of the same date in an attempt to provide some means of reconstructing Old Kingdom town planning (Fairman 1949, 36).