The 1902-04 excavations of John Garstang at Beni Hasan in Egypt provide us with a window into the growth of professional archaeology in the last century. He was one of a group of archaeologists whose interest was primarily in the life and death of the common people rather than royalty, and his excavation of the so-called "Middle Class" cemetery at Beni Hasan was typical of its time in the approach to recording and analysis, while providing us with an example of the rich sites still being discovered at the turn of the last century. My presentation will discuss the process of Garstang’s excavation itself, from the initial contract drawn up in London through which a group of wealthy individuals essentially bought "shares" of the excavation and the objects it revealed, to the post-excavation dispersal of those objects to museums and educational institutions throughout the world. The results of the excavation will also be addressed in some detail; this relatively well-documented site gives us an almost unique opportunity to examine issues of social stratification in antiquity and regional variation in material culture during a period in which the traditional assumption has been that regionalism was a relatively minor factor. Garstang's site report, Burial Customs of Ancient Egypt, is still the standard publication on non-royal burial practices during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, during the first half of the second millennium B.C.E.

A lecture will include a power-point presentation that will include photographs and drawings of the objects, both from Garstang’s original excavations, and from my own examination of the material in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, as well as historical, sociological, and statistical analysis of the material from the site.