I don't agree with this one Jon.
In fact, your post has been worrying me since last night, and all the way over to Cyprus here by plane today.
Petrie did a fantastic job, and nobody has ever superseded his work with respect to providing accurate hard survey data in an accessible form to peers.
Lehner,for example (not to criticise him - just by way of example), has never published the raw data from the Giza Plateau Mapping Project, and Cole only surveyed a handful of points around the base of the GP.
Petrie also answered the actual archaeological research questions regarding Egyptian cultural methods, and was not just out there to number crunch. The dimensions he focussed on were subjective, but they were also some of the ones that the Ancient Egyptians also focussed on. We know from the Rhind Papyrus, for example, that the base and heights of the pyramids were indeed the crucial dimensions, so to measure these is culturally correct.
IMO The people responsible for encouraging the continued outbreaks of speculative drawing overlays at Giza are the ones who did not accept Petrie's findings, or who never read the rest of his later works analysing the data from Giza and Meidum. People who give the impression that there are still unknowns and unanswered questions are the ones that encourage speculation, not Petrie, who was quite clear what he thought, and made sure it was all published.
The problems with these continued works that imply there are unknowns and unaswered questions is one of the themes in my work which is effectively finished finally. I have critiqued every single serious work available on the subject. Hopefully once it's out we will all be able to see that to put Budge and Petrie in the same sentence is simply sacrilegious!
Petrie was correct, and will remain correct, because he was the first to correctly interpret what the Ancient Egyptians actually did. Budge was often wrong, and will remain often wrong, because he was often wrong.
Likewise, there are people writing in 2008 who are often wrong, and there will be people in 2088 who are often wrong, although I may be wrong lol.
Dave Light.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/29/2008 01:22PM by Dave L.