After Mariette, the next great change in method came from an Englishman with almost no schooling and a gift for measurement. William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) first went to Egypt in 1880 to survey the Giza pyramids, to test a popular claim that the Great Pyramid encoded a sacred unit of length. His measurements showed the claim was false.
Key idea
From the 1880s Petrie excavated with a new kind of care. He recorded small finds and broken pottery, not just statues; he noted where each thing was found; he kept his workers paid for finds so that objects were reported, not sold; and he published his results quickly, often within a year.
Why it works
Most of what a site holds is ordinary: potsherds, beads, tools, bones. Those are also the things that change most often with fashion, so they date a site. A dig that keeps only the statues throws away the clock. Petrie's approach was to note and compare the smallest details, because that is where change shows.
| Years | Site | What it showed |
|---|---|---|
| 1880–1882 | Giza | the most accurate survey of the pyramids made to that time |
| 1884 | Tanis | his first excavation, for the Egypt Exploration Fund |
| 1888–1889 | Hawara | painted mummy portraits of Roman date |
| 1891–1892 | Amarna | the city of Akhenaten; a young Howard Carter trained with him |
| 1894–1895 | Naqada and Ballas | thousands of graves of the Predynastic culture |
| 1896 | Thebes | the stela of Merneptah |
Worked example: Why pay for a bead?
Petrie paid his workers a small reward for every object they found, even a bead. Why was that a good method?
- Without a reward, a worker who found a small object could sell it to a dealer, and it would vanish from the record.
- With a reward, it was handed in and its findspot recorded.
- It made small finds worth reporting, which is what a dated record needs.
Answer: It kept finds, and their findspots, in the record.
Worked example: Publishing as part of the dig
Why did Petrie insist on publishing each season's work quickly?
- Excavation removes the evidence it studies. After a dig, the published record is all that remains.
- An unpublished dig is, for everyone else, a destroyed site with nothing to show.
- Quick publication let other scholars use and check his results.
Answer: Because the publication is the site, once it has been dug.
Common mistake
Thinking only gold and statues matter. Petrie showed that broken pots can date a site, as the next topic, Seriation (Sequence Dating), shows. Ask of any find: what does it tell us, not what is it worth?
Petrie's views on race, common in his time, are now rejected, and some of his work reflected them. His field methods are what lasted.