This book is a col­lec­tion of excerpts from the writ­ings of pio­neer archae­ol­o­gists from the eigh­teenth, nine­teenth, and early twen­ti­eth cen­turies. It includes such mile­stones as Schliemann’s exca­va­tions at Troy, Champollion’s deci­pher­ing of Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs, Bingham’s dis­cov­ery of Machu Pic­chu, and Carter’s open­ing of the tomb of Tutanhka­men. This is but a small sam­ple of the more than sixty excerpts cov­er­ing major archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­er­ies in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South and Cen­tral Amer­ica. The writ­ings are fas­ci­nat­ing for their main con­tent, but also for what they reveal about the evo­lu­tion from wealthy relic-hunting anti­quar­i­ans to method­i­cal, sci­en­tific, and schol­arly archaeologists.

The style, qual­ity of writ­ing, and intended audi­ence vary from piece to piece — some are quite easy to read and under­stand, while oth­ers are intended for schol­ars of a par­tic­u­lar spe­cialty and era. For the lat­ter type, ref­er­ence mate­ri­als such as his­tor­i­cal atlases are quite help­ful. In many cases, there seem to have been maps, dia­grams, or other illus­tra­tory mate­r­ial present in the orig­i­nal texts which have not been repro­duced here. Ceram would have done well to either remove ref­er­ences to plates and fig­ures, or to actu­ally include those ref­er­enced in the excerpts. This edit­ing mis­step aside, I found this to be a fas­ci­nat­ing — although at times dif­fi­cult — read.

This account of the dis­cov­ery of the tomb of Tutankhamen was writ­ten fol­low­ing the first sea­son of exca­va­tion by Howard Carter and his team. As a result, it is a snap­shot of the pro­cess­ing of the tomb in progress; the con­tents of the entry­way and antecham­ber have been cat­a­loged, processed, and removed, but work has not yet begun on the annex, store­room, or sepul­chral hall. The mummy itself still lies within its stone sar­coph­a­gus, inside mul­ti­ple lev­els of sealed shrines.

Carter’s account strikes a good bal­ance between describ­ing the beauty of the arti­facts and explain­ing their his­toric and sci­en­tific sig­nif­i­cance. Sim­i­larly, he writes about his own con­flict­ing feel­ings: the eager­ness of dis­cov­ery ver­sus the method­i­cal demands of sci­ence. For­tu­nately sci­ence wins in every case.

In addi­tion to pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion about Tutankhamen’s tomb, Carter gives us a good pic­ture of the state of archae­ol­ogy in the early 20^th cen­tury. He describes many of the tech­niques used for exca­va­tion, record­ing, cat­a­loging, and preser­va­tion. He also talks about the rela­tion­ships between him, his core staff, and the hired dig­gers. This was still the era in which locals were hired as grunts. The way they were treated and regarded would be regarded as racist today. How­ever, Carter (by his own account) seems to have treated them fairly. He was also not the sort of archae­ol­o­gist who sat in the shade with a cool drink, wait­ing for an impor­tant find. He — as well as his patron, Lord Carnar­von, when he was on site — was inti­mately involved in most of the dirty work.

Carter wrote two more vol­umes as his work on the tomb pro­gressed. I’ll have to get my hands on them, and read about the rest of the tomb’s trea­sures, includ­ing Tutankhamen himself.