On 4 November 1922, Howard Carter and his team discovered the Tutankhamun’s tomb. The subsequent process of clearing the tomb and cleaning, restoring, and documenting the almost 6,000 objects found in its four small rooms took more than ten years. The story of this process survives in extraordinary detail, thanks to the excavation records created during the work. Documenting the tomb was a challenging task because of the quantity, variety, and fragility of some of the artefacts, which included not only gold and semi-precious stones, but also organic materials such as gilded wood, textiles, cakes, fruit, and even flowers. During the first weeks of work, the team developed a meticulous workflow, reflected in the archaeological records. Together, these documents form an interconnected account of the excavation – not just of the objects themselves, but of the process as a whole – allowing us to reconstruct the artefacts’ original find spots, trace relationships between them, and better understand how archaeology was practised a hundred years ago.
The primary archive
When Carter died in 1939, he left most of his estate, including the excavation records, to his niece Phyllis Walker, who had spent a season with him in Luxor in 1931. Although not an Egyptologist, she recognised the archive’s importance and sought advice from Alan Gardiner and Percy Newberry, former excavation team-members. They recommended donating it to the newly founded Griffith Institute in Oxford. Oxford scholars needed the records for publication, and, with war imminent, Oxford was considered safer than London. Most of the records were moved to Oxford in autumn 1939 and, after the war, Phyllis donated the archive and its associated copyright to the Griffith Institute ‘as a memorial to my uncle and his work’.
Today, the Tutankhamun primary archive consists of roughly 20,000 documents, including Carter’s personal diaries and archaeological journals; around 50 maps and plans; almost 7,000 object cards produced by Carter and various specialists; Alfred Lucas’s conservation logbooks; scientific notes by multiple authors for the planned academic publication of the tomb; Carter’s 18 so-called ‘autopsy drawings’; and around 1,200 original glass negatives, together with1,500 smaller glass and film negatives produced by the expedition’s photographer, as well as several thousand original and later prints; and 632 lantern slides. The photographs show not only the artefacts but also the archaeologists at work with the Egyptian team-members.
