Amarna after Pendlebury
The excavation of Amarna was again curtailed by war, and in a very real sense for John Pendlebury, who joined the army in 1939 and was shot in German- occupied Crete two years later. Official work ceased at the site until the 1960s, when the Egyptian Antiquities Organisation dug in the Kom el-Nana and el- Hagg Qandil areas, but no publication seems to have resulted.
In 1977 the Egypt Exploration Society's concession at Amarna was renewed, under the directorship of Barry Kemp of the University of Cambridge. The programme of survey, excavation and conservation resumed and is still ongoing. Kemp brought to Amarna the rigorous methods of modern archaeology. He also brought an archaeological philosophy very different from earlier ones. Pendle- bury's fascination with the Amarna celebrities has mostly gone, along with the desire to interpret the site in terms of their biographies. In a lecture to the Egypt Exploration Society in December 1997, Kemp pointed out that he was not interested in Akhenaten and his reign, but in the society which produced the patterns of living discernible at Amarna. Amarna itself attracts him because it is the only site from Egypt preserving the archaeological evidence to investigate urban life across the full social and environmental spectrum, from palace to slum. Kemp is also interested in economic life at Amarna - the production of commodities like pottery and faience, and how the city was provisioned. He pays attention to the less glamorous aspec ts of the city, such as its animal pens, bakeries, and sectors of the workmen's village where foodstuffs and water were delivered from the main city. This seems to me like an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to forget Pendle- bury's white-painted, pristine Amarna. True, some of the houses at Amarna did have basic indoor plumbing and were regularly swept - but, as Kemp points out, there were no sewers to take away human waste, and household rubbish was dumped in the street, accumulating large piles of rubbish which must have caused problems with vermin. Large-scale excavations of undug parts of Amarna are not a priority; the focus lies more towards consolidating and integrating information from earlier excavations, much of which remained unpublished or, when published, contained errors. For instance, the small Aten temple, examined by Peet, Pendlebury and others, has been being re-examined since 1987.
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.
It is difficult to see how these two polarities can be reconciled in writing an archaeology of Amarna. Michacl Shanks, one of the main critics of current proccssual archaeological excavations like those at Amarna, advocates the construction of what he calls an 'effective history' in which 'the independence, difference and life of the past answer back with a challenge to the present'. '8 Such a history avoids veneration, condemnation or appropriation of the past, and above all refuses to impose a neat or satisfying homogeneity upon it. It is essentially pluralistic, admitting a variety of truths of equal validity. More interestingly for my project, it also allows the claims of minorities and socially repressed groups to their own archaeologies. This has been recognised as legitimate in 'unearthing and objectifying alternative viewpoints and social dispositions, contributing to social change'.39