Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Waging Peace

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Nina Hamedani)

This article appeared on Google Reader this morning, even though it refers to something that took place in October 2008. Still, better late than never:

AT AN OCT. 6 presentation at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, Dr. Mark Lehner, director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates (AERA), discussed archeological endeavors in Egypt “as cultural capacity building.” More specifically, his lecture focused on how archeology in Egypt opens the door to exchanges between Egyptians and foreigners.

Beginning his remarks with a dreamlike photograph of the Pyramids of Giza, Lehner noted that just as “in the popular imagination there’s kind of a fog around the pyramids, as far as who built them and why,” there also is a “fog that surrounds the contemporary Middle East” for many Westerners.

The scholar has excavated in Egypt for over 30 years, producing the only scaled maps of the Giza Sphinx. His more recent focus has been on uncovering the lost city that would have housed the 20,000 to 30,000 pyramid workers.

Under Lehner’s direction, the American Research Center in Egypt’s (ARCE) field school receives financial support from a USAID Egyptian Antiquities Conservation grant, among other international cultural philanthropic and academic organizations. While he considers the field school as “cultural capacity building from the bottom-up”—that being the “robustness behind all successful business organizations”—Lehner acknowledged that the support from the top-down “allows us to be successful, to make change.”


See the above page for the full story.

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