Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T22:36:16.888Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Electronic Egypt: the shape of archaeological knowledge on the Net

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Lynn Meskell
Lynn Meskell*
Affiliation:
New College, Oxford OX1 3BN, England. [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Unlike many regional archaeologies the study of Egypt has always had widespread appeal, from archaeologists to Afrocentrists, orientalists to occultists. According to one web-site, ‘Egypt dominates the history of the world.’ This ever-popular fascination has spilled over into the electronic media since the inception of the Internet. Thus, Egypt proves to be a telling casestudyin net politics and potentialities. Simply typing the word ‘Egypt’ into a Web searcher elicits over 1 million sites, and the content of that material runs the gamut from scholarly resources closely matching those known in print to fringe sites and sci-fi web pages. This makes electronic Egypt an intellectual and ethical minefield for the uninitiated, especially as there proves often little to differentiate between this panoply of sites in terms of presentation and professionality. It palpably illustrates the homogenization of knowledge on the net and prompts us to consider the construction of archaeology and archaeological knowledges.

Type
Special review section: Electronic archaeology
Information
Antiquity , Volume 71 , Issue 274 , December 1997 , pp. 1073 - 1076
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd. 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, E. 1983. Imagined communities. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Barrett, E. (ed.) 1989. The society of the text: hypertext, hypermedia, and the social construction of information. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.Google Scholar
Landow, G.P. 1992. Hypertext: the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology. Baltimore (MD): Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Porter, D. (ed.) 1997. Internet culture. New York (NY): Routledge.Google Scholar
Rorty, R. 1982. Consequences of pragmatism: essays 1972–1980. Minneapolis (MN): University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Taylor, M.C. & Saarinen, E. 1994. Imagologies. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Turkle, S. 1996. Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Google Scholar