Flinders Petrie and Eugenics at UCL

Abstract

William Matthew Flinders Petrie is considered the father of scientific archaeology and is credited with developing a chronology of Ancient Egypt using the nondescript artefacts that other archaeologists had ignored. He occupied the first chair of Egyptology in England, and was also well-known for the museum built around his personal collection of Egyptian artifacts at University College London. Petrie's archaeological work has been studied by scholars, from various disciplines, for its scholarly, cultural, and historical value, while Petrie's life and career outside of archaeology have been the subject of relatively little study. Petrie himself wrote two life stories: the first, <em>Ten Years Digging in Egypt, 1881–1891</em> (1892), detailed the years before his professorship at UCL; in 1932 he published his second, more complete autobiography, <em>Seventy Years in Archaeology.</em> After he died in 1942 there were various obituaries and memorials that outlined his life and major achievements in archaeology. There was very little written about Petrie the man until 1985, when Margaret Drower's <em>Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology</em> was published; it remains the most comprehensive work on Petrie's life. A thin volume of the correspondence of Hilda and Flinders Petrie also allows a glimpse into life on excavation. In short, much of what is known about Petrie focuses on his excavations in Egypt, his time as Professor of Egyptology at University College London, or the museum that bears his name. Subsequently, as a historical matter, Petrie's work in the discipline of eugenics has rarely been discussed as part of his career

‘We Seem to be Working in the Same Line’: A.H.L.F. Pitt-Rivers and W.M.F. Petrie

“…Lane Fox [Pitt-Rivers], 1875: 298), the foundation of which was a keenly-held conservative belief in evolutionary gradualism (Chapman, 1985). Such conservatism also characterized Petrie's worldview (Petrie, 1907(Petrie, , 1911Drower, 1985: 342-343;Quirke, 2010: 14), which ultimately became entangled with his involvement in eugenics (Sheppard, 2010).…”

“…15 For both men, however, their interest in this subject was influenced quite separately by work being undertaken by their close colleagues. In Petrie's case this was Francis Galton and Karl Pearson (Sheppard, 2010), while for Pitt-Rivers it was primarily his friend and excavation partner, George Rolleston (Nowak-Kemp and Galanakis, 2012). 16 An area in which Pitt-Rivers and Petrie certainly departed was in their use of experimental techniques as a methodology for gaining insight into ancient production.…”

Decolonial Feminism and Global Politics: Border Thinking and Vulnerability as a Knowing Otherwise

“…lending historic evidence to the Eugenics Movement (Sheppard 2010;Challis 2013). The myth of 'Eternal Egypt' was also created at the time.…”

The body in the box: archiving the Egyptian mummy

“…Galton's theories informed Petrie's thinking in several ways, including his identification of what he termed the 'new' or 'Dynastic' race, who invaded Egypt from the north, via the Levant. These invaders were, he thought, responsible for changes in material culture identified in the archaeological record, which preceded the formation of Egypt's early state; in other words, new and better blood led to new and better forms of material culture and social organization (Sheppard 2010). To Petrie, the First Dynasty skeletons at Abydos represented the next stage of racial (and thus cultural) development in Egyptian history.…”