Field Notes - 3 March 2014 - Egyptian Archaeology under British Military Occupation (1882-1956)

Disciplinary Formation, Imperialist Gender, Nationalist Class: Egyptian Archaeology under British Military Occupation (1882-1956)Prof Stephen Quirke (ULC)Discussant: Mimi Winick (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey) AbstractIn his 1996 History of Archaeological Thought, Bruce Trigger described archaeology across Africa as neo-colonial. Two decades later, in the political economy of knowledge, de-colonisation remains one paradigm shift that never materialised – nowhere more visibly than in the study of other places/times. With a smaller scale of population, narrowly bounded disciplines offer opportunities to analyse this continuity, and to identify the trump cards of domination. In Egyptology established practitioners such as the philologist Georges Posener have voiced concern over self-isolation; in its current practice, the sub-discipline seems torn between the First World technocracy of archaeological fieldwork, and an anti-theoretical positivism in research into anc