Dr. Kent R. Weeks, SES Honorary President

Dr. Kent R. Weeks grew up in Washington State where he developed a strong childhood interest in ancient Egypt which he has followed ever since. After pursuing a program in anthropology at the University of Washington at Seattle and receiving an M.A. in 1965, he worked on archaeological projects in Egypt and Nubia, particularly the Nubian salvage campaign. During this time he met and married Susan Howe, another student at Washington also working in Nubia. In 1966 he began work with Dr. James Harris on a study of dentition that resulted in a project to x-ray mummies in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. He received his Ph.D. in Egyptology from Yale in 1970, following which he worked for two years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian Department, and taught at the Department of History, Queens College, CUNY. In 1972 he returned to Egypt to teach in the Department of Anthropology of American University in Cairo. While there, he conducted two seasons of field work at the Giza necropolis, re-clearing and documenting a group of mastabas to the west of the Great Pyramid. Beginning in 1974, he was employed for four years as Field Director of the University of Chicago Oriental Institute's Epigraphic and Architectural Survey at Chicago House, Luxor. From 1977 to 1988 Dr. Weeks was Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. From 1988 to the present he has been professor of Egyptology at American University in Cairo.

During his stay at Chicago House, Dr. Weeks became aware of the need for a dependable and comprehensive atlas to locate the numerous monuments in the Theban region. After returning to the U.S., Weeks began a project to survey and map the locations of tombs, temples and other archaeological sites and structures on the Theban West Bank and thus the Theban Mapping Project was started in 1978. In 1987, Dr. Weeks began examining an area to the northeast of the entrance to the tomb of Rameses IX where he felt a long-neglected tomb might be located. By 1995, Dr. Weeks realized that he had unearthed the largest tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The responsibilities of dealing with this complex tomb has changed, to some degree, the focus of the Theban Mapping Project, but Dr. Weeks remains committed to the original goal of accurately documenting the archaeological heritage of Thebes.

Courtesy:   www.KV5.com    www.thebanmappingproject.com