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, Ten Years Digging in Egypt, 1881–1891 (1892), detailed the years before his professorship at UCL; in 1932 he published his second, more complete autobiography, Seventy Years in Archaeology. 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 Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology 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.