Joann Fletcher (born 30 August 1966) is an Egyptologist and an honorary visiting professor in the department of archaeology at the University of York.
She has published a number of books and academic articles, including several on Cleopatra, and made numerous television and radio appearances. In 2003, she controversially claimed to have identified the mummy of Queen Nefertiti.
Joann Fletcher | |
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Born | Barnsley, West Riding of Yorkshire, England | 30 August 1966
Nationality | British |
Title | Honorary Visiting Professor |
Academic background | |
Education | Barnsley College |
Alma mater | University College London University of Manchester |
Thesis | Ancient Egyptian Hair: a study in style, form, and function (1995) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Egyptology |
Website | www.immortalegypt.co.uk |
Fletcher was born on 30 August 1966 in Barnsley. She was educated at Barnsley College, a sixth-form and further education college in Barnsley. She studied ancient history and Egyptology at University College London, specializing in the Ptolemaic dynasty and Cleopatra.
She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1987. Fletcher then earned a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1996 from the University of Manchester, with a thesis on hair and wigs entitled "Ancient Egyptian Hair: a study in style, form, and function".
Fletcher is honorary visiting professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York and Head of the Local Ambassador Programme at the Egypt Exploration Society. She is a consultant Egyptologist for Harrogate Museums and Arts and an archaeology consultant for the museums of Wigan and Barnsley, for which she curated a trio of exhibitions in 2017–2018.
In addition, she has contributed to galleries at the National Museum of Ireland, the Great North Museum in Newcastle, Sheffield’s Weston Park Museum, Scarborough’s Rotunda Museum, the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. In 2012, she and Dr. Stephen Buckley worked with Sheffield's Medico-Legal Centre to mummify a human body donor.
Fletcher has undertaken excavation work in Egypt, Yemen, and the UK, and has examined mummies both on-site and in collections around the world.
Fletcher writes for The Guardian newspaper and the BBC History Magazine and website. She has made numerous appearances on television and radio and was lead investigator in the History Channel television series Mummy Forensics.
Her publications include The Story of Egypt, Cleopatra the Great and The Search for Nefertiti, together with guidebooks, journal articles, and academic papers.
In 2003, Fletcher and a multidisciplinary scientific team from the University of York, including the forensic anthropologist, Don Brothwell, took part in an expedition to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt that was sanctioned by Zahi Hawass, then head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). The investigation pursued a hypothesis put forward by Fletcher that one of the three mummies studied could be the mummified body of Queen Nefertiti. All three of the mummified bodies had been found among a cache of mummies in tomb KV35 in 1898. The team's scientific findings supported this and the hypothesis was included in the official report submitted to Hawass and the SCA shortly after the 2003 expedition. The expedition, the result of 12 years of research, was funded by the Discovery Channel, which also produced a documentary on the findings.
Fletcher's conclusions were dismissed by a prominent group of Egyptologists (some of whom previously claimed that the mummy in question was male who was young as fifteen years old, a theory now disproven), and the evidence used to support Fletcher's theories was declared as insufficient, circumstantial, and inconclusive. Archaeology, a publication of the Archaeological Institute of America, asserted that Fletcher's "identification of the mummy in question as Nefertiti is balderdash". Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, subsequently banned her from working in Egypt because he said "Dr. Fletcher has broken the rules" requiring all prominent discoveries be subject to approval by the SCA prior to publication in popular media.
According to The Times newspaper, British archaeologists "leapt to her defence", however, and they reported that the research team members stood by their findings. The team members maintained that no rules were broken, on the basis that the official report submitted to the SCA included Fletcher's hypothesis, described by others as a 'discovery', and that Hawass had been informed of what was to be put forward in the television programme prior to the Discovery Channel documentary being aired.
The ban on Fletcher's research in Egypt was later lifted, and she resumed working in the Valley of the Kings in April 2008.
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