The American archaeologist George Andrew Reisner (1867-1942) represents one of the true greats from the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Egyptology. Indeed, he remains, as Sir Alan H Gardiner described him over 80 years ago, ‘one of the greatest and most successful excavators Egypt has ever known’. By the end of his career, George Reisner had excavated 23 sites in both Egypt and northern Sudan, as a result making some famous and spectacular discoveries. He also carried out excavations at the ancient Levantine site of Sebastia – biblical Samaria.
Founding father
Reisner is rightly renowned, too, as a pioneering archaeologist and one of the ‘founding fathers’ of modern archaeology not just in Egypt, but around the world. He developed a systematic, scientific approach to the excavation of archaeological sites focused on the advancement of knowledge, rather than ‘treasure hunting’, earning him the sobriquet ‘the American Petrie’. However, his approach to archaeological fieldwork surpassed that of his English counterpart, involving photography at every stage of an excavation (45,000 plate-glass negatives survive from Reisner’s excavations), the production of thousands of accurate archaeological drawings (including the earliest use of section drawings in Egyptology), and the keeping of voluminous dig diaries and object registers.
Unusually for the time, some of the latter were written in Arabic by Reisner’s Egyptian foremen, and Reisner was popular with his Egyptian workers, since he treated them well. As a result, they gave him the affectionate nicknames ‘the Doctor’ and ‘Papa George’.
