"The Petrie Museum Archives"
Published by the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, 1999
Price: GBP 50
I've just received from the Museum Bookshop in London (info: mbooks@btconnect.com), the University College London (Petrie Museum) CD Rom including all Petrie Archives there.
The CD has all extant Petrie field notebooks covering
all his excavations in Egypt, tomb registers, various
miscellaneous information and two typed MS by him.
Much of this was previously available in microfiches
but this is more complete and an essential tool to
recover data that he recorded but saw unnecessary to
publish at the time. Those notebooks are a story in
themselves, it seems that during the war they were
put away since most were due for destruction since
the idea at the time was "published, destroy",
"unpublished, keep", by mistake or a fortunate turn
of fate, they remained and I used many of those
notebooks in 1979 (consulting the actual items that
now are being preserved this way to limit handling)
for my research, rescuing thus information that covered
Predynastic cemeteries such as Ballas and Diospolis
Parva that were very summarily published.
For those who haven't got this CD ROM yet, I'd strongly advise to get it, it runs even on a 386 PC with 256 colours and Windows 3.1 or higher and it is an exceedingly useful wealth of information which previously could only be bought as microfiches for over L 100. At half that price, it is even more convenient.
I really think this CD should be in any institutional library
anywhere since Petrie is accepted today as the
founder of modern archaeology. The notebooks are also
extremely valuable as research tools in their own
right.
I hope this endeavour will be matched by other similar ones
so that we can all access such valuable data bases
with great ease and comfort without having to travel
to far away places.
J. J. Castillos
juancast@yahoo.com