egypt-museum:

“In the early days of archaeology it was the tombs that interested excavators and collectors. The city site was not investigated properly until the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, under Bernard Bruyère, tackled it. 

He worked there for over twenty years, and he mentions that, at the beginning of the last century, a visitor to Deir el Medina might have seen houses with their walls still intact and tombs still capped by the little pyramids which were characteristic of the period. 

By the time he arrived it was all gone, wrecked by amateur archaeologists and by some professionals who did not know their trade well enough. “The passion for antiquity destroyed what the centuries had spared.””

— Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt, by Barbara Mertz