It’s hard to miss Laurel Bestock’s enthusiasm for her combined discipline of archaeology and Egyptology. When she talks about it, she sits forward, her eyes brighten and she speaks intently.

“I can’t wait to take my students to Abydos,” she says, referring to the ancient Egyptian site where she has done much of her investigation. As long as the students don’t have to memorize her lengthy new title — assistant professor of Egyptology and ancient Western studies — she’s likely to find some recruits for such a trip.

“Most kids say they want to be an archeologist or paleontologist at some point during their childhood,” says Bestock. “It’s all the digging! And I just never grew out of that.”

Bestock put an academic stamp on that digging at Brown, when she received her A.B. with a concentration in Egyptology. By the time she graduated, she could envision the interdisciplinary position to which she has just been named. “It was my dream to come back to Brown in a double concentration — Egyptology and archaeology,” she says.

Graduate school and many trips to Egypt have filled the intervening years. Bestock received both her M.A. and Ph.D. in art history and archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Bestock has spent much of her time in Abydos, close to the Nile in southern Egypt. The ancient city flourished from the predynastic period of 3500 B.C.E. through Christian times — about the seventh century C.E. Abydos is the site of some of the most important archaeological records of pharaonic Egypt, particularly from the early periods. “The gravesites in Abydos contain the answers to some of the most fundamental questions of death and kingship of that time,” she says. Deceased kings were often buried with their possessions, and much of the household was sacrificed so they could continue together in what they perceived as a next life. “You have to get into their mindset,” she says. “There was an absolute belief in the afterlife.”

Yet so many of the tombs have been plundered — some shortly after burial — that the job of piecing together the past is especially challenging. One of Bestock’s most important finds in the field was an undisturbed tomb she discovered in 2005, with the roof, bones, and contents untouched. “You can’t imagine what it’s like to come across an intact grave,” she says. “It’s very humanizing.”

She admits that archaeological fieldwork is not for everyone. “It takes a certain type of person to be successful at it since you are usually isolated with a small group of people in the desert and living in very basic quarters. But it has gotten better since the advent of the Internet and DVD’s,” she says.

Bestock rejects the notion that archaeology is a dusty glimpse of the past. “The scope of human endeavor is connected,” she says. “The better we try to understand the past of any culture, the more insightful we are about our own.”