Featured Conservation Projects
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The American Research Center in Egypt has been actively helping to conserve Egyptian monuments since 1993. With funds generously provided by the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and in close collaboration with Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), over fifty projects have now been completed.
The scope of ARCE conservation work covers all periods of Egyptian art and architecture at monuments and sites throughout the country from pre-historic to Islamic. ARCE’s Egyptian Antiquities Conservation Project (EAC) encompasses the latest series of projects to be implemented under an agreement with USAID begun in 2004. In 2007 additional funding specifically for conservation and training in the Luxor area was received, and work is continuing.
In the wake of the Revolution of 2011, it has become even more apparent that the future of Egypt’s monuments must rest ultimately with Egyptian archaeologists and conservators. ARCE’s conservation initiatives include a significant emphasis on training for our Egyptian colleagues. Since 1995 some seven-hundred SCA employees have participated in ARCE’s training programs. These initiatives have received enthusiastic support from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.
A selection of current conservation projects is featured below.
Starting in Luxor.....A new conservation and training
Working inside Deir el Shelwit
program known as the Annual Program Statement (APS) is well under way. This program is in response to USAID’s job creation program in the wake of the events of the Arab Spring in January 2011. To respond directly to Egyptian-identified needs in the areas of job creation, poverty alleviations, and economic development, ARCE initiated a plan to create several hundred jobs that target unemployed youth in Luxor, where the economy has been particularly hard hit. Read more >>
The church of Saints Bishai and Bigol, the ‘Red Monastery,’ was the heart of a large monastic community, in a region known as an important center for ascetic life in the 5th century, A.D. It is an astonishingly rare example of the coloristic intensity of late antique monuments in Egypt. In this church, late antique paintings cover about eighty percent of the walls, niches, columns, pilasters, pediments and apses.
Director: Dr. Elizabeth Bolman, Temple University.
November 2005 - Ongoing
Every cultural heritage conservation program is a unique, unrepeatable opportunity to study the structure and context of the particular monument, site or work of art. While the focus of our monastery projects has been on cleaning and conservation of wall paintings in situ, each project mentioned here has involved not only a team of conservators, but also a group of scholars in art history, archaeology, architecture, Coptology and other related disciplines. Their work is mainly focused on aspects of past history, whereas conservation is concerned with preserving for the future what we have inherited from the past, based on present knowledge and supported by research. Nevertheless, research can support conservation and even contribute to developing a conservation ethic. Read More >>
In response to a request from Dr. Zahi Hawass, then Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, ARCE carried out a six-week season of survey, photographic recording and wall painting cleaning tests at the Dayr al-Fakhuri near Esna. 
Three-thousand, five-hundred years is a long time for any building to stand, and it comes as no surprise that, today, Luxor temple is in need of some help. Many of its columns in the first court, for example, have been showing the very serious effects of exposure to the elements and prior maintenance efforts. Read More >>US Office: 8700 Crownhill Blvd. Suite 507 San Antonio, Texas 78209-1130 p: 210.821.7000 e:info@arce.org
ARCE Cairo Center: 2 Midan Simón Bolívar Garden City Cairo 11461 Egypt p: 20 2 2794 8239 e:cairo@arce.org
