Paper short abstract:

This paper examines archaeology as a historically constituted form of expertise in Nasserist Egypt. The paper grounds top-down political accounts of the era in a bottom-up examination of field practice, suggesting the importance of materiality to understanding the making of post-war political life.

Paper long abstract:

What happens when practices of knowledge production become central to plans that not only set out the future of a state and its people, but that also involve a complex array of other institutions and actors? How do practitioners negotiate these contexts and rearrange their own work to deal with them? Such questions could be asked of many different disciplines that operated in the years after the Second World War, especially as their practitioners became involved in the implementation of modernisation policies that circulated around the globe. In the context of Egypt under Nasser, and taking into account the other contemporary political arenas within which modernisation policies took shape, this paper investigates these questions in relation to archaeological fieldwork.

Since Britain had declared Egypt's (nominal) independence in 1922, archaeological work in Egypt had been a contentious space: one within which the army of foreign practitioners who surveyed and excavated in the country felt squeezed by a growing number of Egyptian archaeologists. Yet national imperative was tempered by moves to international collaboration. Especially after the Free Officers' coup of 1952 and Nasser's rise to power, this collaborative work started to become more prominent, constituting archaeological fieldwork in Egypt as a form of expertise that could help to modernise this particular decolonising nation-state, and helping to cement the long-running role of certain institutions as centres where that expertise might emanate from. This paper explains how, grounding the top-down political narratives under discussion in the bottom-up experience of the archaeological field.