EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
All change at Doughty Mews The last few months have seen considerable change in the EES London Office. As I wrote in a post for my blog last year entitled ‘Reviewing, rethinking, unpicking, rebuilding’ (http://goo.gl/kHseKQ), much of the work my colleagues and I have been doing in modernising the Society and the way it operates has taken place away from public view. The changes have been substantial, however, and should stand us in very good stead to continue delivering a first-class programme of activities in an increasingly challenging environment both in terms of funding and the situation in Egypt. We begin 2014 with almost an entirely new staff team in London. Along with myself, the line-up is now as follows: Jan Geisbusch (Publications Manager), Carl Graves (Education and Public Engagement Manager), Hazel Gray (Office Manager) and Maria Idowu (Finance and Business Manager). Biographies and photographs of the team are available on the Society’s website and all are looking forward to meeting more of our members at Doughty Mews and elsewhere in the coming months. Maria takes over from Roo Mitcheson, who left the Society’s employ after seven years in October 2013. Roo came to the Society in 2007 with undergraduate and master’s degrees in Egyptian archaeology and maintained his interest in fieldwork as a key member of the University of Reading’s archaeological team at Lyminge in Kent. His principal work for us, however, was to set about a comprehensive overhaul of the Society’s finances and this has been an essential part of the modernisation I referred to above. Having gained a qualification in finance administration for charities during 2013 Roo left us to take up a post as Finance Manager at a new firm and we wish him the very best of luck. Carl will be with us for one year while Jo Kyffin is away on maternity leave. Jo’s first baby, Alexandra, arrived in January, and both are doing very well. Hazel and Jan’s posts are almost entirely new. Hazel has been tasked with overhauling various aspects of the administration of the London office to ensure that all the new systems and processes we have introduced lately are running as efficiently as possible. Jan will be overseeing the production of the Society’s publications, initially the Excavation and other Memoirs and the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology in particular. Volume 99 of the JEA was mailed to subscribers in January 2014 and for the second year in succession runs to 352 pages, 48 more than had been the
The EES London team. Left to right; Jan Geisbusch, Maria Idowu, Hazel Gray, Carl Graves and Chris Naunton
norm in recent times. This is due to the sheer quantity of EES research and other high-quality work submitted for publication in the Journal, which in turn is testament to its standing as one of the foremost publications in the field. Printing and mailing larger volumes has come at no small cost to the Society but reflects our commitment to conveying as much of the very best Egyptological work as possible, and to the highest standard. This was the last volume of the Journal to be edited by the University of Liverpool team. The Editor-in-Chief, Roland Enmarch, his predecessor Mark Collier, and their colleagues, in particular Glenn Godenho, have worked tirelessly to produce the Journal to the highest standard and to ensure that each volume has been published within the year of imprint. Not only has the Liverpool team maintained the JEA’s position as the leading predominantly English-language journal in the field, it has done so at a time when the Society’s finances have been particularly stretched, tightly monitoring the content in each volume so as to control print and distribution costs. We are extremely grateful to Dr Enmarch and his colleagues and very aware of the sacrifices they have had to make in terms of their own research while working on the Journal, and we wish them all the best. A new Editorin-Chief, Martin Bommas, has now been appointed to take on, with Jan, the production of the 100th volume. Further changes to the Society’s publications programme will be under way in the coming months. Thanks to the new appointments, we are very well placed to ensure that we can continue and develop the excellent work represented by all our titles, including this magazine! CHRIS NAUNTON
EES Patrons Current EES Patrons, for whose most generous support the Society is very grateful, are: C T H Beck, Raymond Bowker, Andrew Cousins, Martin R Davies, Christopher Gorman-Evans, Richard A Grant, George Huxley, Michael Jesudason, Paul Lynn, Anne and Fraser Mathews, Anandh Indran Owen, Lyn Stagg, John Wall and John Wyatt. If you would like to become an EES Patron, please contact Carl Graves: carl.graves@ees.ac.uk.