Archaeology has grown exponentially since the days of Schliemann, Evans and Stein. Developments in numerous other disciplines have fed into archaeology's own growth--geology, geography, statistics, linguistics, paleontology, paleobotany ... the list could be extended several times over. As archaeology has absorbed the lessons of such contributing disciplines, it also has put such lessons to use by becoming increasingly more specialized over time. One often is no longer a practitioner of mere archaeology, but is instead a maritime archaeologist or an archaeoastronomer or an ethnoarchaeologist:
Most of what archaeologists do, however, has only rarely ever been on the radar of the average Joe and Jane. There is a very good reason for this. If, as one Civil War soldier wrote to his wife, "soldiering is 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror," it would not be too much of a stretch to replace terror with exhilaration and get something akin to the life of the typical archaeologist. McSweeney's in fact recently alluded to this in a clever piece titled So You Wanted to Be an Archaeologist:
You had envisioned study abroad programs at Giza or Angkor Wat. What you ended up with was a summer in the swamps of central Florida, uncovering arrowheads numbers 15,234 through 15,416 left abandoned by yet another well-studied and well-documented pre-Columbian native tribe. Every day was an exercise in being hot, getting bitten by mosquitoes, and carefully sifting and cataloguing two cubic centimeters of soil. Every time you found an arrowhead, which was about once per hour, you tried to envision historically appropriate ways of driving it into your skull. The bow and arrow was a bit unwieldy for the task, and you concluded that modern man's greatest technological achievement was the creation of weaponry compact enough to be easily used on oneself....
In short, archaeology generally goes unremarked by the general public unless one finds something that is pretty dang extraordinary. We have looked at several such finds over the course of the past ten days. All of these finds generated considerable public interest. None, however, has ever so captured the general public's imagination and interest, or had such an impact on the fictional depiction of what archaeologists do, as Howard Carter's discovery of the Boy King way back in 1922:
Carter almost didn't make the discovery. As usually is the case with modern archaeology, Carter was using someone else's money to finance his excavations in Egypt. That money, and his patron's patience, were just about to expire (after several years of fruitless digging) when Carter's water carrier found the steps leading to Tutankhamun's tomb. The rest, as they say, was history:
It was, beyond any question, the sepulchral chamber in which we stood, for there, towering above us, was one of the great gilt shrines beneath which kings were laid. So enormous was this structure (17 feet by 11 feet, and 9 feet high, we found afterwards) that it filled within a little the entire area of the chamber, a space of some two feet only separating it from the walls on all four sides, while its roof, with cornice top and torus moulding, reached almost to the ceiling. From top to bottom it was overlaid with gold, and upon its sides there were inlaid panels of brilliant blue faience, in which were represented, repeated over and over, the magic symbols which would ensure its strength and safety. Around the shrine, resting upon the ground, there were a number of funerary emblems, and, at the north end, the seven magic oars the king would need to ferry himself across the waters of the underworld....
Carter recounted the find in three volumes (1923, 1927, 1933), though complete original sets in anything approaching Fine condition are rarely available in the marketplace (the set below is via The Manhattan Rare Book Company):
Fortunately for less well financially endowed book collectors, the work has been reprinted many times:
Many of these reprints are abridged, so if you have the bucks and want the full story (it took ten years to completely excavate the tomb), be prepared to shell out something in the low- to mid-four figures.
As we shall see in tomorrow's post, the last in this series, Carter's discovery had a huge impact on the world of fiction....
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