Akhenaten полностью

Kemp's broader interest in Egyptian settlement archaeology also extends the life of Amarna as an inhabited site. Earlier excavators tended to be dismissive of the notable Roman and late antique presence there, thinking that the New King­dom material was the most prestigious. Kemp has no such temporal chauvinism, and is keen to integrate this into the wider picture of how the site was utilised over a period of some two thousand years, from the reign of Akhenaten to the seventh ccntury ce. Under his direction, regular excavation reports are published, as well as a detailed survey of the entire city. A rescue component as well as conservation is part of the digging strategy, as exposed mud-brick walls decay and agricultural cultivation encroaches on some parts of the city, threatening it with destruction from ploughing. Under Kemp's direction there has also been a growing 'scicntisation' of the site. There have been minute chemical analyses of gypsum remains, food debris, and reconstructions of ancient technology: for instance, pottery kilns were built in an attempt to test the firing temperatures, the precise weight of fuel needed to heat the kiln, and so on. '⁵

In spite of all this reassessment, it seems to me that the old biographical approach to Amarna's archaeology is not entirely dead. Take the interpretation of the large structure originally identified by Pendlebury as the coronation hall of Smenkhkare', largely on the basis of bricks stamped with his/her pracnomen Ankhkheperure', which may have been found there or in the vicinity. Of course, there is no evidence for Smenkhkare' ever having had a coronation ceremony at all, let alone this being its location. Rcccntly, it has been argued convincingly that the 'coronation hall' was something humbler - a vine arbour, albeit one of monumental proportions - yet Kemp's team still runs with Pendlebury's more romantic identification, on pretty scanty evidence, as they admit themselves. "'

The Egypt Exploration Society's seasons at Amarna since 1977 coincide with an interesting time in the development of archaeology as a discipline. Barry Kemp was trained in the so-called 'new' or 'proccssual' archaeology of the 1960s, which emphasised archaeology's status as a science which could reconstruct an objective past that actually once existed. After Pendlebury's Amarna, where the royal family is omnipresent, it is something of a relief to read the accounts in Kemp's reports of how cloth, bread, pots and faience beads were made there. Yet despite his emphasis on commodities being produced and livings being made, the makers are curiously absent. I think that if Pendlebury over-populated his Amarna, Kemp goes to the other extreme, and they occupy opposite positions in their reporting of excavations at Amarna. Pendlebury's reportage is somewhat sloppy and over-popularised, confusing the difference between past and present. Kemp's is meticulous and specialised. Even those familiar with the methods of field archaeology find it difficult to extract much of a social nature from it. Proc- essual archaeology has often been criticised for being so full of scicntific jargon that is incomprehensible even to those within the field of archaeology.⁵'

The new archaeology practised by Kemp was itself a reaction against the traditional approach to ancient artefacts as the tangible illustrations of a text which had already been written - the notion of archaeology as the handmaiden of history which underpinned Pendlebury's excavations. In its turn, processual archaeology has received a lashing from more political sections of the archaeo­logical community, influenced by (among other things) feminism, structuralism and neo-Marxist critiques of capitalism and anthropology - the so-called 'post- processual' archaeologists. They criticise processual archaeology's over-reliance on scicnce, its creation of law-like generalisations about the past which leave no room for individual sets of circumstances, intentions and actions, and the way that it denies multiple views of any given past. Archaeology, as the excavations at Amarna illustrate so clearly, is always embedded in 'meta-narratives', pre-existing scenarios which shape interpretation and response, such as ideas about Egypt being the cradle of monotheism or of western civilisation. Post-proccssualists would argue that archaeology often supports largely Eurocentric structures or assumptions, which benefit the status quo and are therefore not committed to political change - again, something the history of excavations at Amarna illustrates.