บุคคลฟลินเดอร์ส พีทรีFlinders Petrie

Petrie taught himself to survey before he could vote. At nineteen he produced the most accurate survey of Stonehenge then made; in 1880 he went to Giza to measure the pyramids and found the place, in his words, "a house on fire, so rapid was the destruction". He called his own job that of a "salvage man".

From November 1884 he dug almost continuously — Tanis, Tell Nebesheh, the Fayum, Amarna from 1891, Tell el-Hesi in Palestine in 1890, the Merneptah stele at Luxor in 1896, the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions at Serabit el-Khadim in the winter of 1904–5. He cut the foreman out of his digs and paid the workmen direct, which he said stopped finds being pulled out fast and sloppily. In 1904 he set the method down in Methods and Aims in Archaeology. In 1913 he sold his Egyptian collection to University College London, where it is the Petrie Museum.

The amulet book is the one this atlas leans on. Amulets: illustrated by the Egyptian collection in University College, London, Constable, 1914, runs to 190 pages and sorts the material by what Petrie took the object to be doing — amulets of power, of property, protective amulets, the human-headed gods, the animal gods, the properties of stones. Inference — a museum drawer labelled by function rather than by find-spot is a drawer laid out on that scheme, and a visitor reading a case label in London, New York or Cairo is usually reading Petrie's categories at one remove.

The other half of the record is dated too. Petrie has been denounced for his pro-eugenics views; he was a dedicated believer in the superiority of the Northern peoples over the Latinate and Southern peoples, and he put the argument into his 1906 series Question of the day, blaming England's social problems on racial degeneration. It ran into his Egyptology: he held that Egyptian civilisation came from an invading "Dynastic Race" that conquered what he called in 1895 an "inferior, exhausted mulatto" population. E. A. Wallis Budge argued against him that Egyptian religion was of a piece with the religions of northeastern and central Africa; most of their colleagues at the time sided with Petrie.

The Petrie Museum at University College London holds the excavated amulet series he sold it in 1913. UCL marked the centenary of his 1923 knighthood by asking, in its own words, "Between investigations on eugenics, decolonial practice, and calls for repatriation, what has become of Flinderella?" Inference — both halves of him are still in the room: the typology is working equipment, and the racial theory it was written beside is now the subject of the museum's own labels.