Book Review
STEPHEN QUIRKE. Hidden hands: Egyptian workforces in Petrie excavation archives, 1880–1924. x+334 pages, 40 illustrations. 2010. London: Duckworth; 978-0-7156-3904-7 paperback £18.
Review by Nathan Schlanger
Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives, Paris, France
(Email: Nathan.schlanger@inrap.fr)
In the course of his long-lasting career, spanning some five decades across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Egyptologist William Flinders Petrie must have met, interviewed, recruited, initiated, trained, paid, disciplined and dismissed several hundreds if not thousands of Egyptian men and 'boys', and girls too, employed on his numerous archaeological excavations. Quirke's focused and well-documented study of these 'hidden hands' enables us to reach beyond the brief remarks scattered in Petrie's publications (chiefly his 1904 Aims and methods in archaeology) to other relevant sources, such as the unpublished journals he used for reporting regularly to his sponsors in England, the notebooks where he jotted down daily events during his excavation campaigns, and the photographic records he accumulated over the years. It becomes perceptible from these sources, sometimes explicitly and more often between the lines, just how constantly this indefatigable hero of Egyptology was preoccupied with maintaining (a semblance of) control, struggling to exercise vigilance and monitor as best he could the comings and goings of his swarming workforce. Indeed the colonial settings and circumstances are quite palpable here. Though in some respects lording it over his imperial (or protectorate) subjects, though mastering (in all senses of the word) the local language from early on, though compelled to engage in applied ethnography to establish his 'firm but fair' reputation, the harassed Petrie must have been kept perpetually on his toes by the sheer complexity of the native structures of kinship and hierarchy. Alongside tensions between the Bedouin Arabs and the settled Fellahin, each with their more or less stereotypical customs, moods and antagonisms, alongside perpetual negotiations with recalcitrant supervisors and local sheikhs, Petrie had to deal with a plethora of recommendable brothers and cousins eager to be put on the payroll, not to mention the range of other occupations and business ventures in which the natives engaged, from Nile-river shipping to goat herding to simply being emphatically unavailable during the harvesting seasons. As Quirke indicates, there is much in these archives to usefully complement more formal appraisals or administrative statistics, and provide for a better-grounded social and economic history of colonial Egypt.
But what of archaeology, and its history? What is brought to light by this case study to make us (including the non-Egyptologists among us) pay attention? Here Quirke's agenda proves to be laudably militant, but also limited by its avowedly presentist concerns. An excavating Egyptologist himself, Quirke retraces to Petrie's times the origins of the current labour regime, where local workers are assumed to be 'archaeologically illiterate', suitable only for heavy-duty menial work rather than the marking of finds, let alone their recording or documentation (pp. 11, 27, 34 etc.). Deploring that these local hands are effectively excluded, Quirke would like to see them benefit from more local empowerment and control (p. 97) — which effectively amount to acknowledging, albeit a century late, the names of the discoverers (p. 155). Pages of such names are duly provided (especially chapters 7 and 8), but the thoroughness of the enumeration cannot alleviate its somewhat anecdotal character. Surely the relevant issue is not that Petrie fails to acknowledge that it was Ali, Hassan, Tom or Harry who had found such or such now cherished item. The issue is rather that the knowledge produced by Petrie on ancient Egypt has been conditioned, shaped, oriented, constrained — in interesting ways that remain to be elucidated — by the very conditions of archaeological labour prevailing in the Egypt of his time. The control that Petrie is struggling to exercise has not only to do with colonial postures and aspirations, but also with genuine concerns over the scientific claims and credibility of the archaeological discipline. So when he grants that 'Engagement, dismissal & the money bag are all in my hands' (p. 60), Petrie's implied admission that so little else is also bears on the knowledge that he can produce. Even within an object-based 'objective' science such as archaeology, Petrie cannot really place his trust in the observations of his labour. The problem is not limited to the lucre for Antikas and the ensuing frauds or 'planting' of finds by less scrupulous natives. With the capitalist system of bureaucratised incentive in place, he has to reward his workforce by a complex combination of the time passed on site, the cubic metre or basketful of soil displaced, and the agreed-on worth of the more valuable finds unearthed. Surely the cognitive costs outweigh here any financial benefits, when access to the past is mediated by such a Pharaonic apparatus, indeed an Oriental chaos of the kind (in)famously decried by Mortimer Wheeler. These quandaries here are not only Petrie's, of course, and nor are they limited to Egyptology (which in fact seems to fare rather well, thanks to the ostentatious monumentality and literacy of the past under study). Indeed the question of these 'hidden hands,' as Quirke aptly raises in this book, is a far more pervasive one, touching on the very nature of archaeological practice, past and present.
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