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PETER DER MANUELIAN: What does an expedition
leave behind for future generations?
Well, in the very old days, it wasn't really excavating,
it was plunder and grabbed the treasures and go fill your museums.
Thankfully, times have changed.
And by about 1900, we had the era of responsible, scientific, modern
archeology underway.
What does that mean?
That means documentation.
You're trying to keep a record of everything you do,
so that future generations can virtually reconstruct
the results of your excavation.
They can test your theories or interpretations,
and they can look at the records of your material and see if it all makes sense.
George Reisner was one of the very first to do this,
following in the footsteps of his British counterpart
Flinders Petrie, who was making sequence records, annotations and taking
photographs.
Reisner took all this a step further, and he worked out
a very complex recording system that tried
to capture all the information relevant to the expeditions
that he directed for so many years.
So that began with photography, and in those days
it was glass plate negatives.
Think of lugging a heavy wooden tripod and a large forman camera around.
These negatives ranged in size from four by five inches,
fairly small, all the way up to eight by ten inches.
Imagine trying to keep that from breaking, not to mention deal
with all the chemicals and get the things
stabilized when you're out in the dig field with the sand
and the wind and all those other challenges.
So here is a photograph of the three different sizes of glass plate negative
that George Reisner used.
In all of his digging years, so about 40 years
at 23 different archaeological sites, he amassed an archive of about 45,000
of these plates.
For Giza, there are about 21,000 of them,
and I'll return to that issue in a moment.
What to do with these?
How to make them accessible?
So photographs are one challenge.
And here is a shot of one of these large plate cameras.
This is down in the tomb of Queen Hetepheres to G27000X.
We're about 90 feet underground.
So imagine getting all that equipment down there,
and the cables and the electric lights and setting up all the glass plates.
Here's a photograph of the storage cabinets of some
of these tens of thousands of images.
It is time that they're all made accessible.
And that's part of what a project that I was very fortunate to set in motion
is trying to do.
This began in the year 2000 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In addition to photographs of course, you need record books, ledgers.
These were the databases of their time.
Of course, Reisner didn't have access to modern SQL databases
and other types of relational information,
so it all had to be written in ledgers.
There were photographic register books.
They kept the numbers of the negatives.
They kept the descriptions of the sites, what angle they were looking at,
what was the date, who was the photographer.
And the same thing happened to the photographic object records of objects
as well.
One of the challenges in preserving this material
is that the documentation is suffering sometimes almost as
much as the antiquities themselves.
It has now been about 100 years or more since some of these great expeditions.
So you're looking at two photographs of Giza
and they almost look like nuclear explosions here.
But what you're really seeing is the chemical decomposition
of the chemical surface on the glass plates.
They need to be conserved.
This arrow is now pointing to a photograph of the famous pair
statue of Menkaure and his queen.
Maybe you can just make out the shadow there as it comes into view.
In addition to the glass plates and the photographic register,
there were object register books.
These were huge ledgers that, again, were the databases
for all of the objects found.
Everything inside had to be recorded precisely
and Reisner worked out a numbering system.
Here's a sample page of a headrest.
This would be a sort of ancient pillow.
So this object would get its own number, it
would get a description, a sketch, the measurements, where did it come from.
That's all important -- the provenance, right? --
What shaft, what tomb, what number did it come from?
And then of course, everything had to be described.
So there were daily excavation diaries.
Here's a page in Reisner's own hand.
And the way he arranged it was to have a sort of table of contents
at the beginning of the page and then go into detail:
We did this tomb that tomb, this shaft, that temple,
and to describe what was found, how far down they went
and what they might have found.
These are indispensable records of the daily progress of the expedition, not
to mention lots of local color.
Visiting dignitaries and others who might
have come by the site, political events, some of the stormy international events
that happened.
Remember, this is a man digging through two world Wars, one and two,
and trying to deal with his archaeological legacy accordingly.
In recent years, we made an additional discovery.
And that was by contacting the descendants of George Reisner's
Egyptian workmen.
And it turned out they had saved about 74 excavation diaries
that their family members had been keeping in Arabic for George Reisner.
For some reason, they had stayed in Egypt,
and so we were able to get the permission to take these volumes
and to scan them.
And in the case of the Giza books, we've translated them.
And they will be part of our corpus of information.
These are fantastic records that join our English diaries, and in many cases
they contain sketches that are missing from their English counterparts.
In addition, an expedition has to leave plans and sections,
architectural drawings, renderings.
Here is a shot of a major part of the Western cemetery.
And you can see the mastaba tombs, large and small.
All of their individual shafts have been given letter numbers.
And you can see just how detailed and complex
it is to excavate an area as densely settled as this part of Giza is.
There are plans and maps that are in excellent condition,
depending on the types of paper used.
There are others that are suffering.
This is a kind of a cardboard like paper of a very, very large overview plan
that really wants to start crumbling to the touch.
So we've got the full range of conditions and preservation challenges
from the original expedition archive.
George Reisner published a tremendous amount from his work
for the Harvard University Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition,
but he was mostly interested in interpretation and synthesis.
So his volumes are often talking about casing types and burial shafts
and development of these different forms,
rather than treating each individual mastaba tomb by itself completely.
He wanted to undertake such a series, but he did not
live long enough to do so.
So it was left to his successors, the curators at the Museum of Fine Arts
Boston, to start something called the Giza Mastaba Series,
and to date there are eight volumes in this series.
And they undertake the individual study of tombs in a one
by one sort of format.
As much as George Reisner published, he left thousands
of pages of unpublished manuscripts.
And this is something else that we've been
dealing with as we try to learn more about Giza
and unite all these different types of materials.
And that's really the challenge, how to unite this diverse media.
Here is a plan and a section drawing of an individual burial shaft.
There are thousands of these left behind.
From the graph paper pencil versions, to the final inked versions
meant for publication.
And of course, figural drawings of the tomb scenes and inscriptions.
Many of these have been drawn too, and they all
needed to be taken into account.
Here is a scanning procedure of one of these oversized
and rather fragile drawings.
So our big challenge then in attacking this material,
is, first of all, to be grateful that it exists because we have
this record of so much work at Giza.
But then secondly, how do you make it accessible.
In the old days even if you had a travel grant
to come to Boston to look at this archive, you would be overwhelmed.
And chances are you didn't have enough money
to stay long enough to view everything that you wanted to view.
And so the challenge was to digitize, to scan,
to type, to database all this material, and most importantly to link it
together intelligently, so that online users anywhere in the world
could be interested in just about any part of Giza.
From an inscription, to a statue, to a posture, to a tomb number,
to a particular photograph taken on a certain day.
And all of that material should be accessible.
This diagram shows you a mastaba tomb, that's
the individual tomb for an Old Kingdom elite Egyptian in the center.
And then the arrows point to all the different types of media
that we've been dealing with since the year 2000,
since the Giza project began.
First at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and now at Harvard University.
So that means photographs, old and new, black and white
in color, diary entries, object register book entries, plans and sections,
published articles and books, unpublished manuscripts.
All of it comes together and all of it gets linked to the appropriate tombs
and monuments in question.
Along the way, we try to work with newer technologies as well.
And in another section, I'll be talking about the 3D applications to Giza.
From these traditional archaeological materials
we've then moved into 3D visualization of the entire site.
And the goal now is to merge all of that material, old and new,
so that you could virtually fly over the site, dive down a burial shaft,
inspect a particular wall, and click on it to see a translation or a drawing
or a link to a publication about it.
So this drawing that you're seeing now is
of a so-called slab stele, kind of a tombstone that was put
on the outside wall of a mastaba tomb.
It shows the deceased tomb owner, her name, her titles,
and it has various offerings and lists of linen intended for her burial.
This was done without any pen or ink involved at all.
But with a process I call digital epigraphy.
The old days consisted of tracing.
Here you see an Egyptologist with tracing paper, or actually
pencil tracing the inscription on Giza tomb wall.
We don't work that way nowadays.
We work from and enlarged photographs and try to trace the photographs.
And then we've taken that step 1-bit further to move into the digital realm.
And that means high resolution images onscreen
that we then trace with digitizing tablets and digital pens.
So here's a beautiful photograph from the Reisner expedition.
Again, preserving so much more than you might see on the tomb wall today.
We then trace that on screen and create a beautiful vector
line drawing with wonderful mathematically calculated lines, not
pixels or bitmaps.
And then we make the photograph go away.
The result is a line drawing that can be scaled or re sized or published
or colorized or texture mapped onto a 3D model.
We can even pull out individual hieroglyphs
and make paleographical charts to study how the shapes of the forms
changed from tomb to tomb and over time as the Old Kingdom progressed.
So the Giza project is blending the older traditional archaeological
material with newer technologies.
And in another module, I will show you some of the directions
that we're taking all of this exciting material further.