Barry Kemp, an archaeologist whose decades of painstaking excavations in the abandoned capital of a mysterious pharaoh have helped revolutionize the understanding of how everyday ancient Egyptians lived, worked and prayed, died on May 15 in Cambridge, Great Britain, one day after his 84th birthday.

The death was announced by the Amarna Project, a non-profit archaeological organization of which Mr Kemp was director. The cause of death was not disclosed, nor was the place where he died.

Almost from the moment he arrived fresh out of college to teach at Cambridge University in 1962, Mr Kemp was a phenomenon. At just 26 years of age, he published a paper in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology that changed the debate about a series of tombs dating to around 3000 BC, showing that they were most likely precursors to the pyramids.

Much of his work, however, had little to do with the pharaohs. He was one of the first to apply questions of social history, in which scholars study the lives of ordinary people in the past, to ancient Egypt.

“I wanted to use modern and necessarily slower methods of excavation and study with the aim of learning more about life in the city,” he told Humanities magazine in 1999. “I am more interested in the ability of archaeology to bring to light the more fundamental aspects of society.”

Anyone who visited Mr Kemp in the field found an archaeologist who was not from the middle of history: tall and burly, with a big bushy beard and a permanent deep tan. He was known for his meticulous attention to detail, looking for subtle pieces of evidence – fossilized fleas, pieces of clothing, even the remains of 3,000 year old beerwhich Mr. Kemp helped reverse engineer and which he then brewed in 1996. (A colleague said it tasted like a malty Chardonnay.)

In a field as vast as Egyptology, where scientists are necessarily limited in their investigations, Mr Kemp was a generalist who was able to contribute new insights to many sub-fields.

“He was just one of the greats, so we don’t have any scholars left in the field,” said Laurel Bestock, an archaeologist at Brown University who worked with him on the ground, in a telephone interview. “His work touches every corner of Egyptology.”

In between his excursions, he wrote a flurry of essays, journal articles and books, including Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, first published in 1989 and thoroughly revised in two subsequent editions; it remains required reading for anyone interested in Egyptology.

Mr Kemp is most closely associated with a site called Amarnaabout 320 kilometers south of Cairo, far from what most tourists see when exploring the remains of ancient Egypt.

Amarna was the desert capital built by Pharaoh Akhenaten, who ascended the throne in 1353 BC. He practiced an early form of monotheism, worshipped the sun god Aton and had up to 50,000 of his subjects with him to build the city.

Amarna was seven miles long and three miles wide, and was built around palaces and temples, one of which, the Great Temple of Aten, was half a mile wide. But the lack of drinking water and Akhenaten’s deep unpopularity at his death around 1335 BC caused the Egyptians to flee north again, leaving Amarna in the desert.

Precisely because of its inhospitable location, Amarna escaped the fate of the cities to the north, which were looted and built over. It is considered an Egyptian version of Pompeii, the Roman city frozen in time after being buried under volcanic ash in 79 AD.

Amarna was also the perfect setting for a study like Mr Kemp’s into the lives of ordinary Egyptians.

At first glance, the palaces and temples tell a story of immense wealth. But over the decades, he and his team uncovered cemeteries, workshops and villages that revealed a darker story: that of the ordinary people, including slaves, who toiled and died to make all this splendour possible.

Ancient Egypt was never a good place for workers, but remote, sun-scorched Amarna was particularly brutal. Most died in their early 20s from malnutrition, spinal cord injuries and the plague.

“The bones reveal a darker side of life,” Mr Kemp told the BBC in 2008“a remarkable reversal of the image propagated by Akhenaten of an escape into sunlight and nature.”

Barry John Kemp was born on May 14, 1940 in Birmingham, England. His father Ernest was a traveling salesman and his mother Norah (Lawless) Kemp was a household keeper.

His father served in the British Army in Egypt during World War II, and the postcards and photographs of pyramids and palaces he sent home sparked his son’s early interest in archaeology.

Mr Kemp studied Egyptology and Coptic Philology at the University of Liverpool, graduating in 1962. In the same year he began teaching at Cambridge, where he spent his entire career. He obtained a Masters degree in Egyptology from Cambridge in 1965.

His first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, Miriam Bertram, an Egyptologist with whom he worked closely, his daughters Nicola Stowcroft, Victoria Kemp and Frances Duhig, two granddaughters and a great-granddaughter.

Mr Kemp first travelled to Amarna in 1977 and returned every year until 2008. Even after travelling less, he continued to visit the site as often as he could.

He summarized much of his fieldwork in his 2012 book The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and Its People. He had a lot to say, and while most of it remained within the bounds of scholarly discourse, he did have a warning for would-be autocrats like Akhenaten.

“The danger of being an absolute ruler,” he wrote, “is that no one dares to tell you that what you have just decided is not a good idea.”