The People Who Built the Pyramids – How We Know
“The People Who Built the Pyramids – How We Know”
Mark Lehner is Director and President of Ancient Egypt Research Associates, Inc. (AERA). His forty years of archaeological research in Egypt includes mapping the Great Sphinx and discovering a major part of the ‘Lost City of the Pyramids’ at Giza. Lehner directs the Giza Plateau Mapping Project (GPMP), which conducts annual excavations of Old Kingdom settlements near the Sphinx and Pyramids with an interdisciplinary and international team of archaeologists, geochronologists, botanists, and faunal specialists. From 1990-1995 Lehner was Assistant Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at the University of Chicago. He is now Associate at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago.
Lehner was born, raised, and began his college education in North Dakota. He went to Cairo in 1973 as a Year Abroad Student at the American University in Cairo where he received his B.A. in Anthropology. He lived in Egypt for 13 years, working for American, Egyptian, British, French, and German archaeological projects. From 1979 until 1983, he was the Field Director and then Director of the Sphinx Project sponsored by the American Research Center in Egypt. In 1984, he began the Giza Plateau Mapping Project (GPMP), sponsored by ARCE and Yale University where Lehner received his PhD in Egyptology in 1990. In 1985 he founded AERA with Matthew McCauley.
In 1988, the GPMP began to excavate in search of the settlement and infrastructure that supported the pyramid work force. In 1995 AERA assumed financial and administrative responsibility for the GPMP. AERA’s interdisciplinary team has been discovering more of the Giza pyramid builders’ urban administrative center including workshops, storage buildings, bakeries, and barracks. In 2011 AERA became an NGO registered with the Egyptian government.
Lehner has appeared on television in National Geographic’s Explorer program, and on NOVA’s Riddles of the Sphinx and Secrets of Lost Empires series on ancient technology, including This Old Pyramid and Obelisk. He is author of The Complete Pyramids, published in 1997 by Thames and Hudson. His work has appeared in articles in National Geographic, Smithsonian, Discover and Archaeology.
Sponsored by the Howie and Louise Phanstiel Chair in Leadership