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MODERN EGYPT

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Bianca
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« Reply #15 on: January 07, 2009, 07:22:53 pm »










                                                  DIGGING IT:   ARCHAEOLOGY IN EGYPT







 

Dr. Mark Lehner describes the ARCE field school,
which teaches Egyptian students archeology

(Staff photo N. Hamedani).
 
   
AT AN OCT. 6 presentation at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, Dr. Mark Lehner, director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), discussed archeological endeavors in Egypt “as cultural capacity building.” More specifically, his lecture focused on how archeology in Egypt opens the door to exchanges between Egyptians and foreigners.

Beginning his remarks with a dreamlike photograph of the Pyramids of Giza, Lehner noted that just as “in the popular imagination there’s kind of a fog around the pyramids, as far as who built them and why,” there also is a “fog that surrounds the contemporary Middle East” for many Westerners.

The scholar has excavated in Egypt for over 30 years, producing the only scaled maps of the Giza Sphinx. His more recent focus has been on uncovering the lost city that would have housed the 20,000 to 30,000 pyramid workers.

Under Lehner’s direction, the American Research Center in Egypt’s (ARCE) field school receives financial support from a USAID Egyptian Antiquities Conservation grant, among other international cultural philanthropic and academic organizations. While he considers the field school as “cultural capacity building from the bottom-up”—that being the “robustness behind all successful business organizations”—Lehner acknowledged that the support from the top-down “allows us to be successful, to make change.”

ARCE works with the Egyptian system, explained Lehner, who has a longstanding working relationship with Dr. Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.  When an excavation takes place in Egypt, Lehner said, an Egyptian inspector is assigned to the project by law. However, he added, they are “there for a legal reason, but they are not very empowered.” The Egyptian inspectors usually graduated from Cairo University with a monument degree, or a focus on Egyptology as art history, Lehner said, meaning they had little hands-on practice in contemporary archeological practices. Through ARCE, Egyptian inspectors are rotated in to work side-by-side with contract archeologists from around the world and the field school’s local students.

An interdisciplinary approach is being taken in reconstructing the lost city [of Giza], using the standards of “settlement archeology,” which examines not only sediment layers, but pottery remains, bone fragments, plant remains, and so on. This approach enables the archeologists to reconstruct what life would have been like for the builders of the Giza pyramids, right down to their food sources.

Unfortunately, Lehner lamented, although his field school observes the strictest of excavation rules, it more frequently is the case that “information is being destroyed all over Egypt” due to inexperience and inadequate practice.

In an effort to counter this trend, the ARCE field school has published manuals and offers a rigorous lecture series nightly, along with tutorials and exams, so that the students and inspectors who graduate are fully equipped.

Many of the inspectors, who already are in charge of overseeing excavations, go on to provide lectures in Arabic about what they learned at ARCE, which Lehner described as the largest mission in Giza that is so international in scope. In fact, ARCE’s holiday card had to be written in 15 languages—including Japanese, Turkish, Swedish, Norwegian, French, English and Arabic.




—Nina Hamedani
« Last Edit: January 07, 2009, 07:27:21 pm by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
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