P Peter L. Shinnie Anna Lucille Boozer Department of History, Baruch College, City University of New York, NY, New York, USA Basic Biographical Information Peter Lewis Shinnie (18 January 1915–9 July 2007) was one of the founders of African archae- ology (Fig. 1). He developed a particular focus upon Sudan and is best known for the 11 seasons he spent excavating at Meroe, the capital of the Meroitic Kingdom. Shinnie was also a pioneer in archaeological, ethno-historical, and linguistic research in West Africa and particularly in Uganda and Ghana. Shinnie was born in Wimbledon near London, where he attended Westminster School. According to Shinnie, he was distantly related to John Garstang, another Sudan scholar, whose sis- ter married Robert Gurney, a relative of Shinnie’ s mother (Grzymski 2007). When he was 12 years old, Shinnie became captivated by H. G. Well’ s chapter on Egypt in The Outline of History . Inspired, Shinnie saved up the two guineas required to purchase Gardiner ’ s recently published Egyptian Grammar and began to teach himself the hieroglyphic script. At the age of 14, Shinnie joined the Egypt Exploration Soci- ety. In 1933, when he was 15 years old, Shinnie was introduced to the eminent Egyptologist F. Ll. Griffith who advised him not to study Egyptology because the career prospects were bleak (Bradley and Robertson 2007). Shinnie ignored this advice. Shinnie’ s first training excavation was in 1934 at Maiden Castle, Dorset, with Mortimer Wheeler (Fig. 2). During four seasons at Maiden Castle, Shinnie learned Wheeler ’ s box method of excavation, to which he remained dedicated for the duration of his archaeological career (Shinnie 1990). He later read Egyptology at Christ Church, Oxford (1934–1938), studying under B. G. Gunn (Bierbrier 2012), and achieving a third-class degree. While at Oxford, Shinnie participated in numerous undergraduate activities: he became an active member (and later president) of the Univer- sity Archaeology Society, joined the University Communist club, learned to fly in the University Air Squadron, and attended lectures on Compar- ative Ethnography at the Pitt Rivers Museum (Shinnie 1990). After graduating from Oxford, Shinnie had to choose between a position on H. W. Fairman’ s excavations at Amara West in Sudan and one as a full-time organizer for the Communist Party at three pounds per week. Shinnie chose the latter (Bradley and Robertson 2007). After less than a year as a Communist Party organizer, Shinnie returned to archaeology with an appointment at the Ashmolean Museum as a temporary assistant. When war broke out in 1939, he was called up to the Royal Air Force to fly bombers. Shinnie was a useful resource for the war effort since he already had done his first solo © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 C. Smith (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_3391-1