Yes, the often slipshod methods of early excavations have been the source of considerable frustration. To outline some of the problems, I’ll begin with how modern excavations work.

Excavations in Egypt today draw upon the services of a wide array of specialists. At a minimum, an excavation requires field archaeologists, a photographer, a registrar, at least one ceramicist, and a conservator. Excavations also routinely employ epigraphers, zooarchaeologists (and/or bioarchaeologists), paleoethnobotanists, and sometimes archaeometallurgists; these specialists usually work with numerous excavations and move between projects rather than spend a full dig season at any one site. The final publication of finds requires an even wider array of specialists in basketry, textiles, lithics, faience and glass, residue analysis, numismatics, etc. Last but certainly not least, Egyptian inspectors ensure that excavations are being run properly.

In a modern excavation, every step of the process is documented carefully. Each square supervisor takes copious notes, photographs are taken daily of the progress and any significant artifacts and architecture, each square is mapped daily, and the contexts of all artifacts are carefully mapped and recorded, including elevation. All of the excavation dirt is carefully sifted for sherds and small artifacts such as beads and glass. At the end of the season, the baulks are mapped to show the stratigraphic sequences.

Early excavations were run quite differently. Supervising was wholly inadequate, an excavation director sometimes overseeing dozens or even hundreds of men. Daily records and photography were rarely habits, and most excavation dirt was simply dumped rather than sifted. Flotation did not come into vogue until the 20th century, so botanical remains were rarely collected. Animal bones were noted if they were unusual (e.g. elephant bones) but rarely collected, analyzed, and published. Finds were recorded by general context (i.e. “this is everything that came from Tomb E13”) rather than their specific location within an archaeological grid.

Petrie began to change that. His guide book for archaeological field methods indicates his awareness of the need for systematic records.

Tomb — Position relative to other tombs. Size of pit, direction, depth. Position of chamber. Filling intact, or estimate of time that it has stood open anciently by the weathering of the sides. Objects found loose in filling. Chamber plan. Primary or secondary burial. Position of body, head direction, face direction, attitude of body and limbs. Position of beads and small objects on body. Note if beads follow any pattern or order; record order of as long groups of beads as possible for rethreading; wrappings, amount and nature. Coffin or cartonnage; inscription and figures, if any, often need copying or photographing before removal, as they may fall to pieces. Skull and jaw to be removed for measurement; or, if in rarer periods, whole skeleton to be preserved. Position and nature of all offerings and objects placed in the tomb. Copies of any inscriptions or paintings on the walls of the tomb.

This was a huge improvement over earlier methods but still leaves something to be desired by modern standards. Failing to collect skeletons, for example, robs scholars of the opportunity to study wear patterns on ancient remains, which can shed light on routine activities that individual carried out in life. For example, it’s common for the skeletons of ancient women to have wear and tear on their backs and elbows accompanying enlarged tibias and toes that curl upwards, indicative of long periods of grinding grain for bread. (We have even found the rooms for such grinding activities, one of the best examples of which is at Ebla.) Patterns of injury and disease can also be identified through skeletal remains.

To highlight the problems created by slipshod recording, let’s take a look at the site of Gurob. It was founded as the “harem” town Mi-wer and was excavated by Petrie between 1888 and 1890. Unfortunately, Petrie was — as was his habit — excavating other sites simultaneously and paid relatively little attention to Gurob. Martha Bell notes his absence from the excavations in her dissertation The Tutankhamun Burnt Group From Gurob, Egypt.

In the first season (1888-1889), Petrie worked elsewhere for the first three months (at Hawara and Illahun). He kept a few men with a foreman, but otherwise unsupervised, busy at Gurob to keep the site from the depredations of a rival. He visited the excavations infrequently (once a week, apparently), and must have been informed then, or by messages, about the circumstances of any finds that were brought to him…

In the second season, 1889-90, Petrie again worked elsewhere (Illahun). All his sites had been guarded during the interval between seasons, and he says that they were just as they had been when he left…Work began again at Gurob upon the arrival of a new assistant, the elusive Mr. Hughes-Hughes. He arrived by the week of 1-7 November 1889 and started work by 14-28 November. He may have had no qualifications other than enthusiasm, and he does not seem to have been prepared for the vigorous and spartan life of Petrie’s field camp. Petrie continued his practice of making only infrequent visits to the site, and he emphasized later that he left everything to Hughes-Hughes and had no responsibility for it. He was compelled to leave Hughes-Hughes “entirely unchecked,” while he himself was “merely registering what came in.”

Largely as a result of this lack of supervision, the papyri from Gurob lack a find context. Turning again to Bell’s analysis:

The identification of the papyri from Gurob as distinct from those of Kahun has been quite uncertain…[Petrie’s] records mention papyri twice. The first are fragments from Ptolemaic mummy cartonage, but he correctly observes that these were all late documents. The second mention occurs in the entry for 1-6 April 1889: “2 small rolls of hieratic papyri much rolled but still a fair amount legible”…For further evidence we have only the published report of the first season, where Petrie mentions “Of papyri a few were found, but none in such fine state as those of Kahun. The only royal name is that of Ramessu II. None of the rolls were sealed, and many were crushed up as waste paper.”…

Unfortunately, no clear idea can be gained of the find context from the field notes. Petrie himself was working in the North Town…however, he still found Tomb 31 in the South Town (i.e. “temple” area) in this week. The papyri are mentioned in a separate paragraph, along with other notable finds from the week…So, the papyri could have come from either the north or south towns.

This is terribly frustrating for archaeologists and philologists alike, who want to know the context of the papyri (tomb? house? administrative structure?), which papyri were found together (is there evidence for an archive?), and whether the papyri were found in a primary or secondary context. The excavation of Lahun, to which Petrie turned most of his attention, was also not as well-documented as it could have been. Petrie’s publication of the first season of excavation (Kahun, Gurob, and Hawara) discusses the finds from the excavation at Lahun in 11 pages (!), with little reference to stratigraphy or find-spots. His vague description of the toys of Lahun suffices as an example:

Tipcats flew about in the streets merrily, for as many as 11 have survived. Whip-tops were even commoner, 20 having been found. Balls of solid wood, and of leather sewn in six gores, were made. Dolls of wood, with moving limbs, and painted consoled the girls; and a large store of dolls’ hair, ready to be made up, was left in one room…Clay toys were made of many forms; men, pigs, crocodiles, and other monsters, as well as boats, little vases, &c., were modelled out of the universal Nile mud.

In short, due to the slipshod methods of early excavations, we have often lost the following:

• Faunal and botanical remains

• Human remains (mostly)

• Small objects and sherds that were not collected through sifting

• Find-spots within a specific area of a site

The bad news is that, as is often said, “archaeology is destruction.” What was dug cannot be dug again, so papyri and artifacts that have been excavated without proper recording have forever lost their valuable context. Additionally, the wide exposure of sites without thought to conservation led to massive erosion and the destruction of exposed structures.

The good news is that very little of ancient Egypt has been excavated. In particular, very few settlements have been excavated. The site of Amarna, excavated by Barry Kemp since 1977, demonstrates splendidly the enormous amount of information that can come from well-supervised and well-documented excavations (see The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and Its People). Abydos is another site that was excavated sloppily in the 1800s but has yielded a considerable amount of very useful and fascinating information in recent decades.

Additionally, modern study of artifacts in museum collections excavated decades ago can shed light on where the stone for a stone artifact was quarried, the relative percentages of metals in a metal object, details about the weaving techniques of textiles (e.g. 'S'-spun in the Egyptian style or 'Z'-spun in the European style? composition of the dyes?), etc.

Modern sensing techniques — ground penetrating radar, magnetometry, resistivity — are employed to map sites without excavating them. These techniques are especially useful for the exploration of sites that are under modern cultivation and cannot be excavated, like Qantir (ancient Per-Ramesses) in the Delta.