Fred Wendorf was honored Thursday night in the DeGolyer Library for his book, “Desert Days: My Life as a Field Archaeologist,” published by the SMU Press with the Clements Center.

His reception was held in the Texana Room followed by his book signing and lecture in the Stanley Marcus Room. Wendorf is an archaeologist and served as the Leader of the Combined Prehistoric Expedition to Egypt from which he donated approximately six million artifacts to the British Museum in London, England.

Professor Wendorf currently teaches anthropology at SMU and has been a member of the faculty since 1964. Besides founding the anthropology department at SMU, he also helped found the Fort Burgwin Research Center in Taos for the SMU-in-Taos program. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Science in 1987 and has published over thirty books in his lifetime.

The book highlighted Thursday mainly included his experiences from his expedition to Egypt and Sudan. This particular trip yielded at least 200 archaeological sites after Wendorf faced a battle against his proposals to make the trip. At the lecture he shared a memory of driving up the river and discovering three examples of these 200 sites.

Wendorf made this expedition in an attempt to discover more information about the Paleolithic period. As the Director for Research at a museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he wrote two proposals requesting money to fund his archaeological trip. Although he faced opposition by two men who had already attempted to dig along the Nile, Professor Wendorf was well known for his expertise and was eventually granted the money to work for three years.

A friend who refers to him as a “risk-taker” because of his determination to search an area that several archaeologists had already deemed empty introduced Wendorf.

“Archaeologists know that Fred Wendorf’s expeditions produced much of what we know about the Stone Age prehistory of northeastern Africa and that he contributed centrally to the archaeology of the American Southwest,” Richard Klein, Professor of Biology and Anthropology and Bass Professor in Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University said. “In this book, they’ll discover he can also describe, with modesty and candor, the circumstances that shaped his extraordinary career.”