Black-Topped Pottery

Abstract

Like all great excavators, George Andrew Reisner allowed no observation of his own times to escape its possible application to the work to which he devoted his life. Such a case, a footnote, really, to archaeology and the history of archaeology, occurred at Kerma in 1913. He had just made one of the most spectacular discoveries in the history of the archaeology of Egypt. Many years later he prepared the following note which he meant to have published in the Illustrated London News, to which he contributed regular accounts of the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition in Egypt. From his camp at Giza, he sent the manuscript to England in 1940 but for reasons too obvious to mention, it was never published. It is printed here, exactly as he wrote it and with the same illustrations he had meant to have included with it. It will be remembered that the