Barry Kemp, Who Unearthed Insights About Ancient Egypt, Dies at 84

Barry Kemp, an archaeologist whose decades of painstaking digging at the abandoned capital of a mysterious pharaoh helped revolutionize our understanding of how everyday ancient Egyptians lived, worked and worshiped, died on May 15 in Cambridge, Britain, one day after his 84th birthday.

The death was announced by the Amarna Project, an archaeology nonprofit where Mr. Kemp was director. It did not specify a cause or exact location.

Almost from the moment he arrived to teach at Cambridge University in 1962, fresh out of college, Mr. Kemp was a phenomenon. When he was just 26, he published an article in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology that greatly shifted the debate about a set of burial structures from around 3000 B.C., showing they were most likely forerunners to the pyramids.

Much of his work had little to do with the pharaohs, though. He was among the first to apply the questions of social history, in which scholars explore the lives of everyday people in the past, to ancient Egypt.

“What I wanted to do was to apply modern and inevitably slower methods of excavation and to study with a view to learning more about the life of the city,” he told Humanities magazine in 1999. “My interest is much more in the power of archaeology to reveal the more basic aspects of society.”

Those visiting Mr. Kemp in the field would find an archaeologist out of central casting: tall and sturdy, with a big bushy beard and a perpetual deep tan. He was known for his exhaustive attention to tiny details, digging for subtle bits of evidence — fossilized fleas, swatches of clothing, even the residue from 3,000-year-old beer, which Mr. Kemp helped reverse-engineer, then brew, in 1996. (A colleague said it tasted like a malty chardonnay.)