On his return from Germany in 1899, Reisner organized his first archaeological expedition to Egypt (1899–1905), funded by philanthropist
Phoebe Hearst. In subsequent seasons, he excavated the Middle Kingdom sites of Deir el-Ballas and El-Ahaiwah, where he developed an archaeological methodology that characterized his work from that moment on. In 1902, permission to excavate the Western cemetery in
Giza was granted by
Gaston Maspero, director of the
Egyptian Antiquities Service. The area was divided into three sections, and chosen by lot. The southern section was given to the Italians under
Ernesto Schiaparelli, the northern strip to the Germans under
Ludwig Borchardt, and the middle section to Andrew Reisner. He met Queen
Marie of Romania in Giza. During this first expedition, Reisner gathered and catalogued approximately 17.000 objects. In 1907, Reisner was hired by the British occupation government in Egypt to conduct an emergency survey in northern
Nubia in response to potential damage of archaeological sites during the construction of the
Aswan Low Dam. There, he developed a still-in-use chronology that divided the earliest history of
Ancient Nubia according to four successive cultural groups that he named Group A, Group B, Group C, and Group X (although the term "group B" has fallen into disuse). In 1910, he was appointed Curator of Egyptian Art at Boston Museum of Fine Arts and in 1911 Resiner and his family traveled back to America, where he reassumed teaching at Harvard. In 1913, Reisner was tasked with training the young archaeologist
O.G.S. Crawford in excavation techniques, Crawford was later to warmly recall that Reisner was "an excavator of the first rank". Soon after, he organized the joint expedition Harvard-Boston. Between 1913 and 1916 excavations were conducted in the ancient site of
Kerma (Nubia). Reisner found the skull of a Nubian female (who he thought was a king) which is in the collection of the
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at
Harvard. Reisner believed that
Kerma was originally the base of an Egyptian governor and that these Egyptian rulers evolved into the independent monarchs of Kerma. He also created a
list of Egyptian viceroys of Kush. He found the tomb of Queen
Hetepheres I, the mother of King
Khufu (Cheops in
Greek) who built the
Great Pyramid at
Giza. During this time he also explored
mastabas.
Arthur Merton (London Times) remarked in 1936 in the aftermath of the
Abuwtiyuw discovery that Reisner "enjoys an unrivalled position not only as the outstanding figure in present-day
Egyptology, but also as a man whose soundness of judgement and extensive general knowledge are widely conceded." Although Reisner was not the first to acknowledge the importance of stratigraphy in archaeological excavations, he was one of the first archaeologists to apply it during his excavations in Egypt and develop the methodological principles. Previously, only
Flinders Petrie had paid some serious attention to this technique in his book
Methods and Aims in Archaeology. Reisner took care on identifying different stratigraphic deposits and removing them layer by layer. He insisted on the importance of recording every discovery in order to provide comprehensive interpretations of a site, taking into account the debris and minor artifacts. In this sense, he distanced himself from the work of previous excavators, whose approaches were more similar to those of treasure hunters. Reisner advanced a theory of stratigraphy in an appendix of his manual
Archaeological Fieldwork in Egypt: A Method of Historical Research, published posthumously.
Views on Ancient Nubia Reisner's views on Nubia were conditioned by the theoretical ideas of his own time, many of which were based on contemporary considerations about the progress and decline of cultures. ==Timeline==