related area of research into Egyptian food technology is the analysis of organic residues in amphorae and other vessels, which is beginning to make a significant contribution to the understanding of trading patterns between Egypt, the Levant, and the Aegean.

Thanks primarily to willard libby’s use of Egyptian antiquities as some of his earliest “guinea pigs” in the development of radiocarbon dating, Egyptian archaeologists have been able to take advantage of radiometric methods of dating since the 1950s. In the immediate aftermath of the emergence of dendrochronological curves for the calibration of radiocarbon dates, in the mid-1980s, Egyptology was again one of the yardsticks against which the method was tested (Hassan and Robinson 1987; Shaw 1985). There is broad agreement between the calibrated dates and the conventional pharaonic chronology, but there has never been a concerted attempt to date a wide range of materials from a number of different phases of Pharaonic Egypt (and there are still a small number of disconcerting anomalies, e.g., see Haas, Devine, Wenke, Lehner, and Wolfi 1987). The existing sets of Egyptian radiocarbon dates are too piecemeal (and in many cases too old or too unreliable) to form the basis of an independent radiometric chronological framework for comparison with the conventionally calculated dates.

Another important area of scientific progress in recent years has been the use of geophysical methods of prospecting pharaonic sites, including the use of such techniques as resistivity survey, proton-magnetometer survey, sonic profiling, ground-penetrating radar, and thermal imaging. In the Great Pyramid at Giza, for instance, in 1986–1987 the combined use of microgravimetry (a technique for measuring the relative densities of stone blocks) and the transmission of electromagnetic microwaves revealed the possible presence of hidden chambers behind the stone walls of the so-called king’s and queen’s burial chambers. On a less sensational level, resistivity surveys at Saqqara, Memphis, and El Amarna, during the 1980s and 1990s have proved particularly suited to Egyptian sites. Resistivity traverses have supplemented conventional survey techniques, which has allowed archaeologists both to select areas showing the greatest potential for excavation and to map major features, such as wells or enclosure walls, without actually having to remove the material under which they are buried (see, for instance, Leclant and Clerc 1988; Mathieson and Tavares 1993).

The processual, multidisciplinary strategies of fieldwork that are now largely taken for granted in Egyptology (and even in some fieldwork at funerary and religious sites, as in the application of Schiffer’s “behavioral archaeology” to the excavation of a Theban tomb [see Polz 1987]) have their roots in the archaeology of Egyptian settlements and prehistoric sites. Many sites (e.g., Abydos, Memphis, El Amarna, Elephantine, and Tell el-Dab’a) have been the subject of long-term multidisciplinary research since the late 1970s, thus providing opportunities for the application of numerous innovative scientific approaches to the archaeological remains of the Pharaonic period, including the use of experimental and ethnoarchaeological work (e.g., Guksch 1988; Nicholson 1992).

Theoretical and Practical Problems in Egyptian Archaeology

The sheer consciousness of large amounts of still-unpublished or unexamined data seems to have discouraged archaeologists working in Egypt from experimentation with innovative techniques and fresh theoretical perspectives. Indeed, H.S. Smith sees the apparent theoretical and analytical stagnation of Egyptian archaeology as an inevitable result of the accumulation of vast amounts of relatively unsynthesized data. He argues that the relative lack of explicit method or theory in Egyptology might be an inherent problem for historical archaeologists generally: “Because of the complexity of most of the societies with which they deal, the vast scale of the records and remains known to exist, and the countervailing inadequacy of these to provide a complete cultural picture at any one moment or a complete development through time, historians and historical archaeologists tend to be less analytical in approach, more catholic and less explicit in their assumptions” (Smith 1972, xi).