EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
1904.35.69 Conical basket from Oxyrhynchus
of furniture, door bolts and fishing nets. This material complements and extends the comparable collections of Lahun material held in London and Manchester, and offers considerable opportunities for contextualised reconstructions of domestic environments and industries. Those objects in the collection that are the result of some of the earliest experimental archaeology also reflect the concern with technologies. Examples include several facsimiles of ancient Egyptian boomerangs, which PittRivers himself experimented with to understand their development and use. There are also nine of the earliest known attempts at recreating Predynastic black-topped pottery vessels, made by H C Mercer, of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, for David Randall-MacIver in 1907. However, not all the collection is ‘ordinary and typical’ and it also has objects such as a beautiful fragment of a New Kingdom carved wooden face currently being researched by Earl Ertman (see further p.44) and a striking bronze cat statuette, both from the founding collection. In addition to the object collections, material of interest to Egyptologists also resides in the manuscript collection and in the Museum’s Balfour Library. This includes Gerald Avery Wainwright’s collection of papers and books, which have yet to be catalogued in full. They contain notes on the construction of the Meydum pyramid made during his investigation of the monument with Petrie in 1910 and correspondence concerning material analysis of textiles found at Tarkhan. The report on the Characterization Project will shortly be available on the Pitt Rivers Museum website. It is hoped that this document will encourage researchers to undertake further work on the museum’s collections, including the so far understudied Egyptian material.
City of the Ram-Man The Story of Ancient Mendes
Donald B. Redford
“Donald Redford’s City of the Ram-Man will interest specialists and armchair archaeologists alike. Redford looks at even the most complex archaeological and historical data with the eye of a storyteller. He constantly weaves interesting and often little-known details into the warp of his story, and his work is a rare thing—a consummate fusion of solid scholarship and truly readable history.” —Richard H. Wilkinson, author of The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt Cloth $35.00 978-0-691-14226-5
The Zodiac of Paris How an Improbable Controversy over an Ancient Egyptian Artifact Provoked a Modern Debate between Religion and Science
Jed Z. Buchwald & Diane Greco Josefowicz
q Alice Stevenson is Researcher in World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum. She would like to thank Elizabeth Frood and Jeremy Coote for comments on a draft of this article. The Characterization Project is funded by the University of Oxford’s John Fell Fund and is led by Dan Hicks, Curator/ Lecturer in Archaeology. See: www.prm.ox.ac/world.html and the Museum’s databases http://
“This book makes a major contribution to European scientific, intellectual, and cultural history. Buchwald and Josefowicz have wrested from oblivion a subject that no previous author, French or English, has analyzed in this form or breadth. The Zodiac of Paris not only embodies interdisciplinarity at its very best, but also exposes the nineteenth-century roots of many concerns of the twenty-first century.” —Darius A. Spieth, author of Napoleon’s Sorcerers: The Sophisians Cloth $35.00 978-0-691-14576-1
www.prm.ox.ac.uk/databases.html.
Photographs © The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. press.princeton.edu
1884.58.79 Large bronze seated cat from Pitt-Rivers’ founding collection 43