archaeologists explorers of the human past

ArchaeologistsE X P L O R E R S OF THE HUMAN PAST

ArchaeologistsE X P L O R E R S OF THE HUMAN PAST

B R I A N FAGAN

OXFORDUNIVERSITY PRESS

This book is for would-be archaeologists everywhere

OXPORDUNIVERSITY PRESS

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Copyright © 2003 by Brian FaganPublished by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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Pagan, BrianArchaeologists : explorers of the human past / Brian Fagan.

p. cm. — (Oxford profiles)Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-19-511946-0 (alk. paper)1. Archaeologists—Biography. 2. Archaeology—History.

I. Title. II. Series.CC110.F34 2002

2002006293

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

On the cover: Earthen pot; inset (clockwise from left) Raymond Design: Sandy Kaufman

Dart, Kathleen Kenyon, John Evans Layout: Loraine MachlinPicture research: Lisa Barnett

Frontispiece: Excavations at Koster, Illinois by the Center forAmerican Archaeology and Northwestern University, 1968-1979.

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Contents Preface 7

Maps 10North America 10Central and South America 10Egypt and the Nile Valley 11Africa 11Great Britain 12Europe and North Africa 12Asia 13Southwest Asia 13Greece 13

Part 1. Searching for Human Antiquity 15William Stukeley 18Johann Joachim Winckelmann 22Christian Jurgensen Thomsen .26Giovanni Battista Belzoni 29John Evans 33Jacob Jens A. Worsaae 37More Archaeologists to Remember 41

Part 2. Finding Lost Civilizations 45John Lloyd Stephens 48Austen Henry Layard 51Henry Creswicke Rawlinson 55Auguste Mariette 58Charles Warren 61Heinrich Schliemann 64More Archaeologists to Remember 67

Part 3. The Birth of Scientific Archaeology 71Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers 74William Matthew Flinders Petrie 78Gertrude Bell 82Henri Breuil 86Howard Carter 90Arthur John Evans 94Harriet Boyd Hawes 98Alfred Vincent Kidder 102Oscar Montelius 106

itiitafjasklajs

Sylvanus Griswold Morley 109Aurel Stein 113Leonard Woolley 117Vere Gordon Childe 121More Archaeologists to Remember 125

Part 4. Great Fieldworkers 129Gertrude Caton-Thompson 132Dorothy Garrod 136Kathleen Kenyon 140Mortimer Wheeler 144Louis and Mary Leakey 148Grahame Clark 153John Desmond Clark 157Gordon R. Willey 160More Archaeologists to Remember 163

Part 5. Team Players 167Some Prominent Archaeologists of Our Time 170

Major Events in the History of Archaeology .. .174

Major Events in Prehistoric Times 176

Glossary of Archaeological Sites and Terms .. .178

Further Reading and Websites 183

Index 187

Prefaceadventurers and, sometimes, treasure hunters. Today's popular stereotype hasat least some basis in history but is far from reality. Modern-day archaeologistsare highly trained scientists who study every aspect of ancient human behavior,from that of the earliest humans over 2.5 million years ago to modem indus-trial sites. But they share one characteristic with their predecessors—a deepand passionate curiosity about the human past.

Archaeology began as little more than treasure hunting, a frenzied searchfor lost civilizations and spectacular artifacts. Along Africa's Nile River, innortheast Africa, generations of adventurers excavated and looted ancientEgyptian temples and sepuichers. During the 1940s, Englishman Austen HenryLayard and Frenchman Paul Emile Botta discovered the spectacular palaces ofAssyrian kings in Iraq, in the Near East. During the same decade, Americantraveler John Lloyd Stephens and artist Frederick Catherwood revealed theglories of the Central American Maya civilization to the outside world.

Serious archaeology, which keeps detailed records of the past, began in1859 with the discovery of human-manufactured stone tools in the same layersas long-extinct animals. The discovery coincided with the publication ofCharles Darwin's momentous essay, Origin of Species, in the same year. For thefirst time, the human past had an unlimited time scale, far longer than themere 6,000 years assigned to all our existence in the Old Testament. When thebiologist Thomas Huxley proclaimed in 1863 that humans' closest relativeswere chimpanzees, he caused furious controversy between scientists and thereligious community. He also started a scientific search for human originswhich continues to this day.

The 19th century was the century of archaeological adventure and spec-tacular discoveries, such as the tombs of pharaohs surrounded by gold, and lostcivilizations. German businessman-turned-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemanndug deep into ancient Troy (Hissarlik), with the help of engineers who had dugthe Suez Canal in Egypt. This was archaeology on a grand scale, with relativelylittle concern for science. But by the 1870s, times were changing. Germanarchaeologists at Olympia and other well-known Greek sites began to stressrecording and conservation over magnificent finds. In England, GeneralAugustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers developed excavation methods at sites on hisextensive estates that were to serve as models for modern-day techniques.

Archaeology came of age in the 20th century. At that time, a few archaeol-ogists, like Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, were using the newest scientific meth-ods to study such unspectacular finds as potsherds and beads. In the UnitedStates, Alfred Kidder developed the Direct Historical Method at Pecos, NewMexico. His approach worked back from known historic sites with carefulobservation of occupation layers into the remote past, tracking changes inhuman societies through their evolving pottery styles. This approach is one ofthe foundations of modern American archaeology. British and German archae-ologists refined Flinders Petrie's methods in the 1930s and developed the preciseexcavation methods of today. They were also the first to use photography tolook at archaeological sites from the air, many of them invisible on the surface.

The greatest scientific advances came in the post-World War II era, whenarchaeology formed a lasting marriage with high-technology science. The

Archaeologist—the word conjures up images of eccentric professorsand bold adventurers searching for lost cities and gold-laden burial

L sites. Hollywood movies like the Indiana Jones sagas and TheMummy spring to mind. The earliest archaeologists were indeed

P R E F A C E • 7

Ole Worm's Museum of Curiositieswas a popular attraction in 17th-century Copenhagen, DenmarkAn early prototype for the modernmuseum, Ole Worm's displayed allmanner of exhibits, including geo-logical samples and fossils, skeletonsand skins of exotic Arctic andtropical animals, and artifacts fromAfrica and Asia.

physicist Willard Libby developedradiocarbon dating in 1949, thefirst truly reliable method for dating40,000 years of the past in any partof the world. Simultaneously, somearchaeologists in Europe and theNear East began taking teams ofspecialist scientists with them ontheir excavations, to study suchimportant topics and changinglocal environments and theorigins of agriculture more than10,000 years ago.

Computers, new methods ofstudying ancient climate change,tree-ring dating, and numerousother scientific methods all helpedrevolutionize archaeology from asomewhat casual science into thehighly specialized academic disci-pline and profession that it is today.At the same time, the simple expla-

nations of the past and how human societies changed that were widely accepted inthe 1920s and 1930s gave way to new, much more sophisticated theories. Theseinvolved systems theory, which argued that human societies were part of much widerecosystems and changed constantly to maintain a dynamic relationship with theirsurroundings. In recent years, the search for explanations of the past has gone innew directions as scholars have looked more closely at ancient human behavior, reli-gious beliefs, and other variables that generate change in human societies, yet arehard to detect in archaeological finds.

Since the 1950s, archaeologists have become increasingly concerned about thecontinuous destruction of archaeological sites. Such destruction stems from manycauses—huge dams, which flood river valleys and the archaeological sites locatedthere; urban expansion; highway construction; deep plowing; and mining, to men-tion only a few. Individuals have done their part, too, looting and digging up price-less sites to sell their contents on the open market. So have archaeologists, by dig-ging sites but then not publishing information about their finds. Unlike forests ormany other natural resources, the priceless archives of the human past in the formof artifacts and sites cannot be replaced or regrown. All archaeological excavation isdestruction—which makes the technical skills of the archaeologist all-important andmakes looting an immoral pastime. Amateur archaeologists, working with profes-sionals and through local archaeological societies, have an important role to play inpreserving and studying the past.

In recent years, much federal and state legislation in North America has tried tostem the destruction by establishing legal requirements for anyone developing or dis-turbing publicly owned land (private land is subject to different rules in the UnitedStates). Most archaeology in North America today—both surveys and excava-tions—is devoted to ensuring compliance with existing laws. These field projectscome under the label of Cultural Resource Management (CRM), something verydifferent from academic archaeology, which is concerned only with intellectualissues and basic research. CRM involves many legal issues and is often carried out by

8 • A R C H A E O L O G I S T S

private archaeological businesses as well as by archaeologists who also have profes-sional training in the many legal and related skills needed to carry out such projects.

Despite a huge volume of CRM research, looting and destruction continue.Thousands of archaeological sites have vanished in recent years, not only in urban,but in rural areas. Less than 5 percent of all the archaeological sites in Los AngelesCounty have not been disturbed. The figure is even lower in many areas. Such greatdestruction means that all of us, whether archaeologist or member of the public,must live ethically and responsibly with the past, and with archaeological sites andartifacts. If we do not, vast amounts of information about the development ofhumanity will vanish forever.

The ethics of archaeology for all of us are simple. Report all archaeological dis-coveries to the proper authorities. Do not disturb archaeological sites without pro-fessional training, and above all, do not collect artifacts for yourself either for thepleasure of owning them or for profit. Respect native peoples' burial grounds andsacred places. Above all, treat the past in all its forms as a finite resource that wehold in trust for future generations. The finds of archaeology in all their forms,whether a humble stone chopper, an early farming village, a great city, or a vastpyramid, are part of the common cultural heritage of all humanity. As such, it isour responsibility to look after it for future, still unborn generations.

On the following pages you will meet a wide variety of archaeologists who havebeen prominent in the study of the past. In chronological order, 33 archaeologistsare profiled in extended essays; many others are identified in the section called"More Archaeologists to Remember" that follows each of parts 1-4 of this book. Ifyou want to find out more about some of the archaeologists, consult the books inthe Further Reading list at the end of each person's profile. There is also anotherFurther Reading list in the back of the book that includes morebooks and articles about individuals, archaeology, and the pastthat may be available at your school or local library.

The stories in this book focus on archaeologists between the17th century and about 1960. Since then, the number of archaeol-ogists in the world has increased dramatically. At the same time,archaeology has become a team science, where few scholarsachieve the kind of prominence enjoyed by such earlier archaeolo-gists as Howard Carter, who discovered the tomb of the Egyptianpharaoh Tutankhamun. For this reason, the book ends in Part 5with a brief survey of developments since 1960, accompanied byshort notes on 27 well-known archaeologists of today.

Of course, this book cannot tell the story of every archaeolo-gist who has ever lived; there are thousands of them. Today, thegrowing concern over the destruction of the past has led to thecreation of many new archaeological jobs. Many of them areheld by professionals who work at protecting the finite records ofhuman life and activity throughout the ages. Amateur archaeolo-gists also play an important role in caring for the past for thebenefit of future generations. At a time when archaeological siteseverywhere are threatened with destruction by looters, treasurehunters, and industrial activity, we need an abundance of archae-ologists and interested people to care for our past.

Brian Fagan

Devout Christians search for therelics of St. Etienne in an I Ith-century manuscript illustration.Priests valued saints' relics as waysof attracting pilgrims (and money)to a church, and tomb robbingwas a way of acquiring the relics.

P R E F A C E • 9

1 0 • A R C H A E O L O G I S T S

NORTH AMERICA

CENTRAL ANDSOUTH AMERICA

M A P S • 1 1

EGYPT AND THE NILE VALLEY

AFRICA


GREAT BRITIAN

EUROPE AND NORTH AFRICA

M A P S • 1 3

SOUTHWEST ASIA

GREECE

ASIA

A sketch of the ruins of Troy from a 15th-century manuscript by the Florentine traveler Cristoforo Buondelmonti. Buon-delmonti was a pioneering geographer who traveled extensively in search of antiquities.

1 4 • A R C H A E O L O G I S T S oo

Searching forHuman Antiquity

BC, the Greek philosopher Hesiod speculated about a glorious, heroic past ofkings and warriors. He described five great ages of history. The earliest was anAge of Gold, when people "dwelt in ease." The last was an Age of War, wheneveryone worked hard and suffered great miseries.

Two centuries later, when a torrential rainstorm cut a gully through amound at Agade, near Babylon, and revealed the foundations of a long-forgottenshrine, the monarch Nabonidus ordered the finds from the temple displayed inhis palace.

The Chinese, Greeks, and Romans puzzled over the origins of human soci-ety. As long ago as AD 52, Chinese scholars were speculating about ages of stone,bronze, and iron. Roman tourists flocked to the Nile to admire the pyramids andvisit the great temples of Karnak and Luxor in Upper Egypt. Both the Greeksand Romans assumed that the institutions and priceless knowledge of civilizationhad originated with the ancient Egyptians. Nearly 2,000 years passed beforearchaeologists proved them only partially correct.

Despite Nabonidus's diggings in the distant past, early modern scholarlyinterest in human origins was little more than philosophical speculation. Atthe same time, the tight shackles of Christian doctrine taught that the biblicalaccount of the Creation in Genesis, Chapter 1, in which God created the worldin six days, was the literal historical truth. Humankind was created in the Gar-den of Eden, then cast out because of sin. To question Divine Will was heresy.

The biblical story of the Creation sufficed in a world where few peopletraveled widely and there were no archaeological discoveries to challenge Gene-sis. It was not until the Italian Renaissance of the 14th to 16th centuries thatEuropeans of leisure and wealth began to travel in Greece and Italy, studyingantiquities and collecting examples of classical art. They acquired paintings,furniture, and classical statuary for their homes in a thoroughly unscientificmanner. Soon it became fashionable to be an antiquary—a collector and studentof ancient things.

While rich collectors made beelines for the Mediterranean, their lesswealthy compatriots stayed at home. In England and France they found Romancoins as well as hoards of stone tools and bronze artifacts that seemed much

WILLIAM STUKELEY

JOHANN JOACHIMWINCKELMANN

CHRISTIANJURGENSENTHOMSEN

GIOVANNI BATTISTABELZONI

JOHN EVANS

JACOB JENS A. WORSAAE

S E A R C H I N G F O R H U M A N A N T I Q U I T Y 1 5

1People have speculated about human origins and the remote pastsince the beginnings of civilization more than 5,000 years ago. NewKingdom pharaohs of 1200 BC ordered the restoration of monumentslike the already millennium-old Sphinx. As early as the 8th century

older. There were burial mounds and mysterious stone circles, among them Stone-henge, a place where, in the words of a 12th-century text, "stones of wonderful sizehave been erected after the manner of doorways." Antiquaries such as EnglishmanWilliam Camden traveled the countryside in search of the past, captivated by whathe called "a back looking curiosity." In his great book Britannia, published in 1586,Camden described the British countryside and many archaeological sites, amongthem Stonehenge, which he dismissed as "weatherbeaten and decaied."

Camden was an observer, not a digger. So were his immediate successors, curiousabout "Antiquities ... so exceeding old that no Bookes doe reach them," as Camdenput it in Britannia. Prominent among them were John Aubrey, a 17th-centurylandowner who came across the prehistoric stone circles at Avebury in southernEngland while out foxhunting. A half-century later, the eccentric William Stukeleycarried out the first surveys of Avebury and Stonehenge and dug into several nearbyburial mounds. He was one of the first people to dig for evidence about the pastrather than merely describe monuments and artifacts.

Serious archaeological excavation began in the 18th century. In 1738, Italy'sKing Charles III commissioned Spanish engineer Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre toprobe the depths of Herculaneum, the Roman town buried by a catastrophic erup-tion of Vesuvius in AD 79. The German antiquary Johann Joachim Winkelmannpublished finds from Herculaneum and nearby Pompeii in 1764. His book attractedmuch attention. Classical antiquities became the height of fashion. Interest reachedfever pitch when Napoleon Bonaparte's scientists returned from Egypt in 1804 withthousands of artifacts and magnificent sketches of exotic pyramids, temples, andtombs along the Nile. After the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815, diplomats and tombrobbers competed for Egyptian artifacts, among them circus strongman turned graverobber Giovanni Belzoni, one of the most colorful figures ever to work in Egypt.

While ancient Egypt was being discovered—and looted—local antiquariesbegan excavating barrows, or burial mounds in Europe. The English wool merchantWilliam Cunnington and landowner Sir Richard Colt Hoare opened 465 suchmounds in southern England, sometimes as many as two or three a day. Theirexcavations, and those of many other antiquarians, produced an incredible jumbleof stone artifacts, bronze axes, clay funerary urns, and iron objects. Colt Hoarewas moved to remark of the mess of finds, "How Grand! How Wonderful!How Incomprehensible!"

Colt Hoare was not alone in his confusion. The Danish antiquary RasmusNyerup started a small museum and despaired of putting anything in a meaningfulorder. "Everything which had come down to us from Heathendom is wrapped in athick fog," he complained. He was sure his artifacts were older than Christianity, but"whether by a couple of years or a couple of centuries, or even by more than a mil-lennium, we can do no more than guess."

Nyerup's collections formed the nucleus of the National Museum of Denmark,which was founded in 1807. Its first curator was Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, amerchant's son with a passion for order. He adopted the ideas of Danish historiansand philosophers and divided early Scandinavian cultures into three ages: a StoneAge, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age. Then he arranged the prehistoric displays inthe museum in three rooms, one for each age. Thus was born the Three Age System,the first scientific classification of the prehistoric past, still used to this day.

Thomsen knew that his cherished classification was mere theory. One of hisassistants, a young law student named Jacob Jens A. Worsaae, was an experiencedburial mound digger. He took the Three Age System out of the museum and appliedit to archaeological sites. He proved that the three ages had followed one after the


other through time, finding Stone Age artifacts in layers that were under layers ofartifacts of Bronze Age and later Iron Age life in the same location. Toward the endof the 19th century, another Dane, Oscar Montelius, built on Worsaae's research. Hestudied prehistoric artifacts across Europe and linked the Scandinavian Three AgeSystem to sites and cultures between the Balkans and Britain (see Part 3).

Part of the confusion over the classification of the prehistoric past came fromthe stifling influence of Christian theology. In the 17th century, Archbishop JamesUssher of northern Ireland had studied the accounts in the Old Testament of theBible listing how long succeeding generations had lived. Adding them up, he con-eluded that there were a mere 6,000 years for all human existence. By the late 18thcentury, scientists were becoming uncomfortable with the biblical theory. The newscience of stratigraphic geology—the science of recording and analyzing informationfrom the layers of the earth, which developed during the Industrial Revolution—ledto the discovery of the fossil bones of long-extinct animals in layers that appeared tobe much earlier than the 6,000 years of Creation. French paleontologist JacquesCuvier, an expert on fossil mammals, promptly claimed that successive worlds andtheir animals had been wiped out by great floods, the last being the catastrophe forwhich Noah built an ark, according to the Bible. Then stone axes and other objectsof indisputably human manufacture were found in the same levels as extinct Europeananimals in caves, and notably river gravel in the Somme Valley in northern France.

An eccentric French customs officer, Boucher de Perthes, claimed in 1837 thathumans and extinct animals had lived in France long before the biblical flood. Hewas ridiculed for his persistent claims until 1858, when a committee of the Geologi-cal Society of London excavated Brixham Cave in southwestern England. Theyfound more than a dozen stone artifacts sealed in cave layers that also contained thebones of mammoths (Arctic elephants) and rhinoceroses.

A year later, biologist Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, in whichhe laid out his theory of evolution and natural selection. His essay argued that livingorganisms developed one from another over long periods of time (evolution),through a process that saw the survival of those best adapted to change (naturalselection). Darwin's essay provided a theoretical framework for a human prehistorymuch earlier than the mere 6,000 years Bishop Ussher had calculated from theScriptures. A stream of English antiquaries and geologists, headed by a remarkableman, John Evans, crossed the English Channel to examine de Perthes' sites andfinds. Evans himself proclaimed the Somme Valley discoveries proof of a great antiq-uity for humankind. One of his colleagues remarked that "The flint hatchets . . .seem to me as clearly works of art as any Sheffield whittle."

The serious study of archaeology dates from 1859, when the theory of evolutionand the proof of the association of humans and extinct animals opened up a vastlandscape of prehistoric time, subdivided by Thomsen into the three vast Stone,Bronze, and Iron ages of human development. A century and a half later, archaeolo-gists have peopled this once unknown landscape with a myriad of long-forgottencultures and civilizations.

The insights of Charles Darwin and his colleague, the biologist Thomas HenryHuxley, generated bitter controversy, both from devout Christians and from thosewho were horrified to learn that humans were descended from apes and from "brute-like" people like the brow-beetled Neanderthal man, discovered in the Neander Val-ley, Germany, in 1856. The controversies still echo in the background to this day,but the establishment of the antiquity of humankind set the stage for the momentousachievements of 19th-century archaeology.

S E A R C H I N G F O R H U M A N A N T I Q U I T Y • 1 7

WilliamStukeley

A M I X T U R E OFS U P E R S T I T I O N ANDA N T I Q U A R I A N I S M

illiam Stukeley was one of thefounders of British archaeology and isfamous for having eaten dinner atopone of Stonehenge's massive trilithons(arched stone uprights made from

three stones). His observations and sketches of the famousprehistoric stone circles at Avebury and Stonehenge insouthern England were years ahead of their time and are ofpriceless value to modern archaeologists. His theories aboutthese famous sites and about the mysterious Druid cults ofthe ancient Britons influenced historical, literary, and reli-gious thought for generations.

Stukeley was bom at Holbeach, Lincolnshire, in easternEngland, in 1687. From an early age he was intensely curiousabout the workings of the natural world and the heavenlybodies. He wandered for hours in surrounding forests observ-ing animals and collecting plants. His endless curiosity aboutthe world around him also came from reading and collectingrare trinkets like coins and some antiquities while still achild. In 1703 he was admitted to Trinity College, Cam-bridge, where he studied botany and human anatomy. Hewas an enthusiastic student who was known to steal and dis-sect dogs, even bodies of the homeless, to satisfy his anatomi-cal curiosity. He went on to study and practice medicine in

Archaelogy before the time of photography relied heavily on hand-drawn sketches and field notes of excavation sites. In this sketchmade on August 7, 1723, William Stukeley notes the compostition of a barrow excavated near Stonehenge, the first such record inBritish archaeology.


0

London in 1705, under physician southern England, and resolved toRichard Mead, who encouraged his make "an Exact Model" of the circlesinterest in natural history.Stukeley both as ruins and in their original state,eventually graduated from Cambridge an ambitious project for someone whoUniversity with an M.D. in 1708. had never visited the place.

The young physician had been Between 1720 and 1724 he madeinterested in antiquities since his a series of visits to Wiltshire, whereundergraduate days. He was soon well he mapped both the stone uprightsknown in London scientific circles, at Stonehenge and the prehistoricwelcomed on account of his broad earthen circles at Avebury in theinterests. Stukeley was soon elected a same region. Stukeley was not the firstFellow of the Royal Society, England's scientist to investigate either of thesemost important and prestigious scien- famous sites, but he was the first totific organization. He counted the produce reasonably accurate plans ofphysicist Isaac Newton and the the stone and earthen circles at Ave-astronomer Edmund Halley among bury, which were some 4,500 years old.his friends in the scientific elite. He also rode across the surrounding

Stukeley thrived in the company of landscape and traced the celebratedfellow scientists and wrote learned arti- Avenue, which links the great monu-cles on earthquakes and flute music, ment to an outlying sanctuary.the origin of card games, water turbines, Likewise, at Stonehenge, Stukeleyand Queen Anne's alleged descent from observed the association between thethe biblical Noah. But his lifelong pas- stone circles and nearby burial mounds,sion was British antiquities and the He was the first antiquarian to link aancient Britons, a subject of intense major monument with its surroundinginterest at the Royal Society. Many of landscape, a major concern of modern'the society's fellows were studying the day archaeologists working at bothcountryside and describing archaeologi- Avebury and Stonehenge. Stukeley'scal sites, ancient coins, fossils, and careful survey oriented the Stonehengeother curiosities. Stukeley was also one circles to the cardinal directions of theof the founders in 1717 of the Society compass. Being a skilled astronomer,of Antiquaries of London, still the pre- he also checked with a compass to seemier archaeological society in Britain. if they were aligned with any heavenly

In 1710 Stukeley began a tradition bodies, paying careful attention to theof making an annual excursion on rising and setting of the sun. He wrote:horseback across England, studying "What would be more probable .. .architecture, visiting gardens, and than that unlettered man in his firstexamining archaeological sites. These worship and reverence would directrides provided the raw material for his his attention to that glorious luminary,scientific investigations. On his first the Sun." On the longest day of thesuch trip, Stukeley admired the 4,500- year, June 21, the summer solstice, heyear-old Rollright Stones in Oxford- observed how the rising sun shone intoshire, a stone circle on a low hilltop the center of the circles, which hadwith stones "corroded like worm-eaten been carefully aligned by the builderswood by the harsh Jaws of Time." with this important moment in theStukeley was an ardent supporter of passing of the seasons. Every modemclassical romanticism and described scholar accepts this astronomical inter-the circle as a "heathen temple of our pretation of the alignment,ancestors, perhaps in the Druids' time." Stukeley has left us memorableIn 1716 he saw a print of the circles of descriptions of his fieldwork at bothstone arches at Stonehenge in Wiltshire, sites. In his book Itinerarium Curiosum,

WilliamStukeleyBORNNovember 7, 1687Holbeach, Lincolnshire, England

DIED

March 3, 1765London, England

EDUCATION

Cambridge University (M.D. 1708)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Mapped Avebury and Stonehengeaccurately for the first time andfounded a tradition of landscapearchaeology in Britain; firstscientist to observe astronomicalalignments at Stonehenge; influ-enced generations of writers andscholars with his theories aboutDruids. Wrote Itinerarium Curiosum(1724); Stonehenge, A TempleRestored to the British Druids (1740);Avebury, A Temple of British Druids,Described (1743).

W I L L I A M S T U K E L E Y • 1 9

A page of Stukeley's field notes, madeat Avebury in May 1740.The passageincludes references to Silbury Hill (thesignificance of which is still a mystery)and also to wildflowers and earthworks.

printed in 1724, he describes how heand his patron, Lord Pembroke, puttogether "a most accurate description"of Stonehenge with "nice plans andperspectives." They took the time todine on top of one of the archliketrilithons, where he found spaceenough "for a steady head and nimbleheels to dance a minuet." The two menalso dug into several burial mounds

near the stone circles, where theyfound "chippings of the stones of thetemple. So that probably the interr'dwas one of the builders."

In 1740, Stukeley published amonograph titled Stonehenge, and threeyears later another, titled Avebury.These books set a new standard for fieldarchaeology and remained definitiveworks for many years. In writing them,he was strongly influenced by the workof his predecessor, the antiquary JohnAubrey, who had proclaimed Aveburyto be the work of ancient British priests,the Druids described by Roman generalJulius Caesar in 55 BC. Stukeleyaccepted Aubrey's Druidical conclusionswith enthusiasm. He became convincedthat the two great monuments wereconstructed by the Druids for theirsacred rituals. He thought of the Druidsas ancient British philosophers andpriests who were the founders of ances-tor worship.

Carried away by his enthusiasm,Stukeley shaped his landscape maps toaccommodate his fantasies. At Avebury,he mapped a row of stone alignments tocreate a serpent's tail and changed anearby ancient circle to an oval so itresembled the snake's head. Whilethese obsessions reduced the value ofStukeley's researches, his observationsand plans provide modern scholarswith a unique picture of Avebury andStonehenge before the surroundinglandscapes were disturbed by modemindustrial agriculture. At the time, thestone alignments and other featureswere much more complete than today.Destruction already was in progress dur-ing his visit to Avebury. He watched asthe local villagers levered and crackedancient standing stones for buildingmaterial. His records of the now-vanished stones are priceless today.

Stukeley's last long antiquarianjourney, in 1725, took him and his


friend Roger Gale across remote areasof northern England. They rode along "There is as much of it [Stonehenge] undemolished, aspart of Hadrian's Wall, the outermost enabks us sufficiently to recover its form, when it was in itsfrontier of the Roman Empire, built .between AD 122 and 130. Stukeley was most perfect state. There is enough of every part to preserveso overcome by the sight of the wall the idea of the whole."following the contours of steep hillsides

that he announced his intention to _William Stukeley, Itinerarium Curiosum (1724)preserve and resurrect the glory of theRoman Empire. But his obsessionswith Druid lore gripped his mind evenmore strongly and he never visited the

ancient wall again. He decided to take por all his eccentricities, Williamholy orders and became the vicar of Stukeley was a shrewd observer whoseStamford, Lincolnshire, in 1730, a plans of Avebury and Stonehenge wereposition he held until 1747. In that a model for generations. His astronomi-year, he became rector of St. George's cal observations at Stonehenge wereChurch in London, a post he held the foundation for all subsequent

until his death. research into the significance of thisIn later life, Stukeley became remarkable monument. As archaeolo-

increasingly obsessed with the Druids. gist Christopher Chippindale hasHis work shifted from sober observa- remarked, "Stonehenge has never fullytion to subjective theorizing. He lived recovered from the Reverend Stukeley'sat a time when romanticism nourished, viskm » Every Midsummer>s Day>

when classical allusions and romantic modern-day Druids act out their bizarreviews of simpler societies were in fash- rituals in the heart of the stone circles>

ion. Stukeley embraced the Druids as even tf archaeologists have shown thathis own, even building a Druidlike Stonehenge predates the Druids bytemple in his garden and considering thousands of years. We should lookhimself an "arch-Druid" named Chy- beyond Stukeley's fantasies aboutdonax. He became increasingly eccen- andent rehgious practiceSj for he was

tric, his life a collage of oddities and the founder of a tradition of landscape

infatuations. His lengthy sermons were archaeology in Britain that survivesfamous for their diversions into obscure and flourisnes to this day.topics of natural history and astronomy.On one occasion he delayed a servicefor an hour so that the entire congrega-tion could witness a solar eclipse. His F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

friend and contemporary, Bishop War- Chippindale, Christopher. Stonehenge Com-burton, remarked, "There was in him ^^ London: Thames and Hudson, 1994.such a mixture of simplicity, drollery,

i j.. . .. „. . i Malone, Caroline, and Nancy Stoneabsurdity, ingenuity, superstition, and ' ' \ ,, .. Bernard. Stonehenge. New York: Oxford

antiquanamsm... a compound of T, . . „ ™AOM F University Press, 2002.things never meant to go together."Stukeley died of a stroke in 1765 and Piggott, Stuart. The Druids. London:

was buried, at his request, in an Thames and Hudson> 1985'unmarked grave in the churchyard of . William Stukeky. Rev. ed. London:East Ham, Essex. Thames and Hudson, 1985.

W I L L I A M S T U K E L E Y • 2 ~ T

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JohannJoachimWinckelmann

P I O N E E R OFC L A S S I C A LA R C H A E O L O G Y

"T̂1 came to Rome to open the eyes of those who

H will come after me," wrote Johann JoachimH Winckelmann in a letter to a friend in 1756.H He succeeded with a vengeance, using Greek

•JKai art to proclaim that Beauty was the sister ofLiberty. Winckelmann achieved archaeological immortalitythrough his visionary studies at the Roman towns of Hercula-neum and Pompeii, buried intact by a volcanic eruption ofMount Vesuvius in August AD 79. Thanks to his researches,artifacts from classical sites became not just art objects, butprecious sources of knowledge about our forebears.

A cobbler's son, Winckelmann was born in Stendal,Prussia. He was a successful student and became a privateLatin tutor at the age of 18. From 1738 to 1741, he attendedthe University of Halle as a theological student, intending tobecome a minister. Winckelmann was an indifferent theolo-gian, and dabbled in medicine before taking a series of jobsas a tutor. He also read every book he could get his handson, which kindled a lifelong passion for knowledge. At the

Johann Joachim Winkelmann was a library scholar not an exca-vator. By visiting museums and private collections, he acquiredan encyclopedic knowledge of classical art.


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age of 26 and penniless, he found a job acquisitions. He resolved to make aas the senior assistant master at a gram- study of Herculaneum and Pompeii,mar school in Seehausen. He referred In 1738, Italy's King Charles IIIto the next five years as his "slave years," had commissioned Spanish engineerwhen he labored for a meager salary. Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre to probeBut he was obsessed with learning and the depths of Herculaneum. Alcubierretaught himself English, French, and used gunpowder and miners to tunnelItalian to add to his already impressive into the city, recovering jewelry andknowledge of Greek and Latin. He also statues of eminent citizens. The kingsteeped himself in classical literature, insisted on secrecy, but rumors of thewhich was hard to come by in a small discoveries had spread through Europe,town like Seehausen. His greatest pas- Only a few distinguished visitors weresion was classical art, an obscure sub- allowed belowground, and the findsject two centuries ago. were taken to adorn the king's palace.

In 1748, Winckelmann received a The king's secrecy shocked Winckel-major career break when he left Prus- mann, who was reluctantly allowedsia, which he called a "despotic land," into the king's museum but was forbid-for the more congenial atmosphere of den access to the excavations. This wasDresden. There he became the librar- hardly surprising, for he had strongian for Count Bunau of Saxony, a post views on the proper way to excavatethat allowed him to visit other art archaeological sites and was not afraidlibraries and museums. His seven years to express them,as a librarian gave him plenty of time Winckelmann's impressive creden-for private research. During these years, tials intimidated Italian scholars. Thehe labored on two great works, Reflec- excavators also were afraid that Winck-tions on the Imitation of Greek Works in elmann would publish pictures orPointing and Sculpture, published in descriptions of the works of art before1755, and a lengthy monograph on art they had had their turn to evaluatein antiquity. The book caused consider- them. He angered local experts byable interest, as stories of spectacular accusing them of being little more thanart discoveries from excavations at treasure hunters with no respect fornearby Herculaneum and Pompeii were antiquities. He railed against the igno-circulating through learned circles in rant royal court, which supervised theEurope. Winckelmann developed an Pompeii excavations. Senior officialsincreasing preoccupation with Italy insisted that nude statues of mythologi-and specifically with the Roman town cal figures be locked away because ofof Pompeii. their "lewdness."

As Winckelmann's reputation as Fortunately, during his stay ina brilliant antiquary rose, Italy drew Dresden Winckelmann had learnedhim like a magnet. In 1755 he became how to draw under a gifted artistlibrarian to Count Alberigo Archinto, named Adam Friedreich Oeser. HePapal Nuncio to the Count of Saxony, managed to sketch some of the relicsand became a Catholic, much to the brought back to the museum by thedisapproval of his Protestant friends. excavators and occasionally bribed theHe left Germany for Rome in 1758, excavation foremen to show himwhen he became librarian to Cardinal recent finds. He became increasinglyAlbani, whose collection of classical frustrated by the restrictive atmosphereart was famous throughout Europe. surrounding the excavations. "WithoutFive years later he was appointed super- seeing the plan of the excavations onevisor of the Cardinal's antiquities col- cannot form a distinct impression,"lection and placed in charge of new he wrote. "One is confounded by the

tohannJoachimWinckelmannBORNDecember 9, 1717Stendal, Prussia

DIED

June 8, 1768Trieste, Italy

EDUCATION

University of Halle (theologydegree, 1741)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

One of the first scholars to take asystematic approach to classicalarchaeology and art, and to recog-nize that artifacts and their contextscould yield vital social informationabout ancient societies; producedsome of the first scientific descrip-tions of classical art, using findsfrom Roman Pompeii and Hercula-neum. His History of the Art ofAntiquity (1767) was the first vol-ume on the subject.

J O H A N N J O A C H I M W I N C K E L M A N N • 2 3

This page of Johann Winckelmann's notesdescribes the Palazzo Massimi in Rome,built by architect Baldassare Peruzziin 1535. He notes Greek and Latininscriptions and the rounded cornerof the rectangular building, shaped toaccommodate a roadway.

tunnels and coming and goings bywhich one passes underground."

On a second visit to Italy in 1762,he was greeted more warmly, becauseeven his enemies recognized the accu-racy and scholarly nature of his writ-ings. He was allowed to examine someexcavations at first hand and to reviewarchitectural plans of the major build-ings. As a result, Winckelmann tooka novel approach. He was the firstscholar to examine the Herculaneumartifacts in their original contexts in

the site, which allowed him to drawsocial information from the artifacts.For example, he studied the placementof statuaries, such as those of house-hold gods, in buried Herculaneum resi-dences, trying to reconstruct what partthey placed in daily life. To Winckel-mann, the finds from Herculaneum andPompeii were far more than museumspecimens or trophies displayed byantiquarians. They were vital sourcesof information about daily existence inRoman times. Winckelmann published

2 4 A R C H A E O L O G I S T S

"In the design of the constitution and government of Greeceit is freedom that is the most distinguished reason for thesuperiority of its art."

—Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Artof Antiquity (1767)

his masterpiece, History of the Art ofAntiquity, in 1767. It contained thefirst systematic descriptions of Greekand Roman art based in part on thefinds from the two buried cities.

Winckelmann continued to studythe Pompeii finds and describe themuntil June 1768, when he was robbedand fatally stabbed for some gold coinsin his hotel room while waiting for aship in Trieste. His murderer was a mannamed Francisco Arcangeli, a criminaland former cook, whom Winckelmannhad unwisely befriended at his hotel.

Unfortunately, Winkelmann neverhad a chance to confirm his theorieswith his own excavations. Not that hisdiscoveries caused the excavators of thetwo towns to change their ways.Chaotic treasure hunting continuedfor another century as successive gener-ations of diggers removed frescoes,stripped ancient buildings of their con-tents, and left the exposed buildings todecay. The situation improved only in1860, when King Victor Emmanuel IIbegan to encourage scientific excava-tions at Pompeii as a matter of nationalprestige. It was his excavator, GiuseppiFiorelli, who first recorded Pompeiiblock by block. And it was Fiorelli whofirst noticed cavities in the hardenedvolcanic ash that appeared to havehuman shapes. He filled them with

liquid plaster, which hardened in place,and recovered casts of the bodies offleeing citizens suffocated by falling ash.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann wasnot an excavator, nor did he discoverany lost civilizations. But the authorityand accuracy of his classical scholarshipplaced the study of ancient Rome andPompeii on a new footing. He was thefirst archaeologist to show that everyartifact, however humble, has a story totell—about daily life, religious prac-tices, warfare, for example—if it is stud-ied in its proper context in the earth.His brilliant books and painstakinganalyses set Roman archaeology on anew course that came to fruition in thelate 19th and the 20th centuries.

FURTHER READING

Ceram, C. W. Gods, Graves, & Scholars.New York: Knopf, 1951.

Leppman, Wolfgang. Winckelmann. NewYork: Knopf, 1970.

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. History ofthe Art of Antiquity. Trans. G. Henry Lodge,1767. Reprint, New York: Ungar, 1969.

. Reflections on the Imitation of GreekWorks in Painting and Sculpture. Trans.Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton, 1755.Reprint, La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987.

J O H A N N J O A C H I M W I N C K E L M A N N • 25

ChristianJurgensenThomsen

T H E T H R E EA G E S Y S T E M

Christian Jurgensen Thomsen used a museumto bring order to a chaotic jumble of prehis-toric artifacts, and to human antiquity. Ascurator of the National Museum of Denmark,he sorted through the disorganized storerooms

and laid out three galleries coinciding with three eras ofhuman history. One showed artifacts from the Stone Age, asecond from the Bronze Age, and a third from the Iron Age.Thomsen was a master at classifying prehistoric artifacts. Hismuseum displays produced the first chronological frameworkfor the remote human past, known as the Three Age System.

Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, the son of a wealthymerchant, Thomsen developed an enthusiasm for numis-matics, the study of ancient coins, at an early age. He soonbecame an amateur scientist of varied accomplishment,equally at home with Roman and Scandinavian coins andwith art of all kinds. He was so enthusiastic about the pastthat he came to the notice of eminent scholars involved withthe newly formed Danish Commission for Ancient Monu-ments, set up in 1806. The commission had come into beingas a result of concerns over the destruction of archaeological

These objects were some of the artifacts used by Christian Jurgensen Thomsen to establish his Three Age classification of the past.Stone objects appear to the left, bronze artifacts in the middle, and iron specimens to the right.


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and historic sites throughout Denmark.The commission's tasks included pro-tecting sites, founding a scientific peri-odical, and planning for a futurenational museum.

The antiquary Professor RasmusNyerup of the University of Copenhagenwas a leader in the commission's affairs.He had written much on archaeologyand had lamented the confusion sur-rounding the prehistoric past. Thanksto Nyerup's lobbying, Thomsen wasappointed to the commission in 1816,with the specific task of placing theRoyal Museum of Nordic Antiquities'collections in order and displayingthem to the public.

At the time, the museum's collec-tions were stacked in a church loftwith no one to look after them. Themethodical and thoroughly practicalThomsen was the ideal scholar tobring order from chaos. He organizedthe collections like a business, enteringnew acquisitions in a ledger, catalogingthem, and assigning them numbers.More than 500 specimens passedthrough his hands in a few months,so he soon became familiar with awide range of prehistoric artifacts. Heused his classification expertise withancient coins to place the collectionin order.

Once cataloged, the collectionshad to be made intelligible to the gen-eral public. Thomsen considered vari-ous options and decided to concentrateon the materials from which the toolswere manufactured as a basis for classi-fication. He divided prehistoric timesinto three subdivisions: a time whenstone tools and weapons were used, fol-lowed by one with bronze and copperartifacts, and finally one marked by theuse of iron objects. Thomsen based hisnew "Three Age" scheme entirely onthe museum collections. He drew onNyerup and other earlier writings aboutarchaeology, and on artifacts, especiallygrave furniture, which typically wasfound as several objects of different

type in the same sepulcher, and thus ofthe same age.

Christian Jurgensen Thomsen wasa lively conversationalist and a prolificletter writer, although only one book,the museum catalog, came from hispen. As a result, the only public exposi-tion of Thomsen's Three Age Systemwas in the new National Museum's gal-leries, where the visitor found separatecases devoted to each of the three ages.Nevertheless, Thomsen's ideas spreadwidely, largely because he spent a greatdeal of time showing visitors aroundthe museum, which opened at first fortwo hours a week, then for longer peri-ods. Every Thursday between elevenand one o'clock, he would show visitorsthrough the galleries, enchantingyoung people with his stories anddown-to-earth enthusiasm. He wouldtake the trouble to place a prehistoricgold necklace around a young girl'sneck as a way of making the past comealive for her.

To Thomsen, the past was not justlegend, but made up of material evi-dence. "A tumulus, a stone circle inthe countryside, a stone tool, or ametal ornament unearthed from thesequestered burial chamber—all theseafford us a more vivid picture of theprehistoric age," he wrote in his classicmuseum catalog, A Guide to the North-ern Antiquities, published in 1836.What could have been an obscureScandinavian work soon drew theattention of archaeologists elsewhere.In 1848, noted British archaeologistSir John Lubbock translated Thomsen'sslim volume into English, ensuring itscirculation throughout Europe andNorth America. Within a few yearsthe Three Age System had becomethe foundation of all attempts to subdi-vide and classify the prehistoric pastin Europe.

Thomsen was a museum manabove all else, who had little time forarchaeological excavation. When hedid dig, it was with meticulous care by

ChristianJurgensenThomsenBORNDecember 29, 1788Copenhagen, Denmark

DIED

May 21, 1865Copenhagen, Denmark

EDUCATION

Private

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Developed the Three Age Systemfor classifying prehistoric artifacts,first used in the Royal Museum ofNordic Antiquities, Copenhagen,and soon adopted all over Europe,and later throughout much of theOld World. Wrote A Guide to theNorthern Antiquities (1848).

C H R I S T I A N J U R G E N S E N T H O M S E N 2 7

"The Age of Stone, or that period when weapons andimplements were made of stone, wood, bone, or someother material, during which very little or nothing at allwas known of metals."

—Christian Jurgensen Thomsen, A Guide to theNorthern Antiquities (1848)

the standards of the day. In 1845, heand four colleagues, one an anatomist,excavated a Bronze Age burial site atHvidegaard, north of Copenhagen. Thestone-lined tomb contained crematedbones, a fine array of textiles, and aleather pouch. The pouch containedseashells, a snake's tail, and otherunusual, perhaps sacred, objects. Thegrave goods, which lay on an ox-skin,included a sheathed sword, a finebrooch, and a pair of simple pliers.Thomsen's excavation was unusual forits careful recording methods, and forthe presence of an anatomist, who pro-claimed the cremated bones those of aman. The grave goods were typical fora Bronze Age warrior.

Thomsen devoted his life to theNational Museum, which was moved in1832 from the unused church, to roomsat the Royal Palace at Christiansborg,thanks to King Christian VIII. DuringThomsen's directorship, the museumcollections expanded to more than27,000 items. Funds were short, so hehad to work closely with volunteers.Patiently and calmly, Thomsen per-sisted through financial shortage aftershortage, working without salary him-self, believing that concrete results andeducational displays would ensure thesurvival of his beloved museum. The

Royal Museum for Nordic Antiquitieseventually became Denmark's NationalMuseum. Today it is one of the finestmuseums in Europe.

Few archaeologists have left suchan enduring legacy. Christian JurgenThomsen had one of the essential giftsof an archaeologist—a sharp eye forform and ornamentation, for the smalldetails of individual artifacts. The ThreeAge System was the result. With thissimple, and now much elaborated,framework, the modern science ofarchaeology and archaeological classifi-cation was bom. Later Scandinavianarchaeologists, among them Jacob JensA. Worsaae and Oscar Montelius,refined the classifications and providedmore accurate dates for the three agesin Europe. However, to Thomsen alonegoes the credit for placing the classifi-cation of prehistory on a sound basis.

The Three Age System still flour-ishes today, even if it is now little morethan a broad framework for the past.During the early and mid-20th century,the Three Age System came into usein Africa and many parts of Asia, butincreasingly as purely a technologicallabel rather than a chronologicalsubdivision of the past. But the ThreeAge System has never been used inthe Americas, where copper andbronze were used only in a relativelysmall area.

FURTHER READING

Daniel, Glyn. The Idea of Prehistory. Cleve-land: World, 1963.

Grayson, Donald K. The Establishment ofHuman Antiquity. Orlando: AcademicPress, 1983.

Klindt-Jensen, Ole. A History of Scandina-


GiovanniBattistaBelzoni

E G Y P T I A NA D V E N T U R E R

E X T R A O R D I N A I R E

Giovanni Battista Belzoni was a flamboyantcircus strongman and tomb robber whoselife story reads like a Hollywood movie. Hespent many years as a theatrical and musi-cal hall performer and muscle man, where

he learned how to use gunpowder, levers, and weights. Hemigrated to Egypt, where he blasted and dug his way intoroyal tombs, pyramids, and temples with spectacular success.

Belzoni was bom in Padua, Italy, in 1778, the son of abarber. He refused to enter his father's profession, lived forsome time in Rome, then fled from Italy when Napoleon'sarmies invaded Italy. He made a living as a small-scaletrader in Holland before crossing to England, where hebecame a performer in 1803. Belzoni was good-looking, withan imposing physique, towering more than 6 feet 6 inchestall, the ideal build for a theatrical strongman. He appearedat London's Sadler's Wells Theatre as the "PatagonianSamson," strutting around balancing 12 people on a massive

Giovanni Belzoni appears onstage in London, balancing fellowperformers on an iron frame. Before taking up tomb raiding,Belzoni made his living as a theatrical performer and strongman.This experience allowed him to learn how to work with levers,weights, gunpowder and other theatrical devices—skills thatserved him well as a tomb robber.

G I O V A N N I B A T T I S T A B E L Z O N I 2 9

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"There are two extremes intravekrs. One who is justarrived, has never beforebeen in the country, and ofcourse has no knowledge ofcustoms and things, cannotsee one-fourth of what heshould see; the other is sothoroughly initiated intotheir customs and mannersthat. . .he almost forgetshis own ways."

—Giovanni BattistaBelzoni, Narrative of theOperations and RecentDiscoveries. . . (1822)

iron frame. Between 1804 and 1813 heperformed in theaters throughout theBritish Isles and became a well-knownfigure on the circus and fair circuit.During these years Belzoni acquiredan impressive expertise with levers,weights, and ingenious apparatuses forlifting heavy objects using water inspectacular theatrical displays, excel-lent training for a rough-and-readyarchaeologist of the early 19th century.

In 1813, Belzoni, accompanied byhis Irish wife, Sarah, left England. Bel-zoni performed for a while in Spain,then decided to make his way to theSultan of Turkey's court at Constan-tinople. The couple spent six monthson the island of Malta, where Belzonimet an agent of Mohammed Ali, theruler of Egypt, who was trying to mod-ernize his country. Ever on the lookoutfor a new opportunity, Belzoni came upwith the idea of an ox-powered water-wheel for supplying Nile water to farm-ers' fields. The agent was sufficientlyimpressed to arrange for Belzoni to pre-sent his idea to Ali himself in Cairo.Belzoni landed in Alexandria, Egypt,in 1815.

During his stay in Alexandria hemet his future archaeological nemesis,the French consul Bernardino Drovetti.The two men took an instant disliketo each other. Drovetti was collectingEgyptian antiquities to make a quickprofit, using a gang of toughs whoroamed up and down the Nile for thepurpose. He seems to have sensed apotential rival, also out for fame anda profit, although at the time Belzonihad no interest in collecting. Anintense rivalry did indeed develop asBelzoni became a collector a fewmonths later. It is questionable whowas the more ruthless, Drovetti withhis gang or Belzoni with his inex-haustible ingenuity.

The Belzonis traveled on to Cairo,where Giovanni built his ox-drivenwaterwheel. Wily bureaucrats promptlysabotaged the ingenious machine be-cause it threatened to undermine theirhold over water supplies for farming.Penniless and without employment,Belzoni was hired by Henry Salt, theBritish consul in Cairo, to trans-port ahalf-buried, 9-ton head of the pharaohRamses II from its resting place in thepharaoh's mortuary temple on the eastbank of the Nile at Luxor to the portof Alexandria on the MediterraneanSea. From there, it would be shippedto the British Museum in London.

Most people, even Napoleon'ssoldiers, considered the task impossi-ble. Belzoni simply applied the exper-tise learned during his circus days. Heassembled some ropes and palm-treetrunks, levered the head out of thesand, loaded it on a crude woodenbase, and employed dozens of mento drag the massive statue on rollersto the bank of the Nile River hundredsof yards away. When the local head-man tried to make difficulties, Belzonisimply picked him up and shookhim until he cooperated. Ramses'shead is now on display in London'sBritish Museum.

Belzoni had come to Egypt to buildagricultural machinery. He now foundhimself a successful archaeologist ofsorts, in a place with the potential forspectacular finds on every side. Drovetti'smen were already digging at Luxor andin the rich burial grounds on the westbank of the Nile. Belzoni decided to seewhat he could find on his own account.While he waited for a boat to carry thehead of Ramses II downstream, Belzonidug in the temple of the sun god Amunat Karnak near Luxor and searched formummies in the rocky caves near thevillage of Qurna on the east bank of the


Nile River. He soon realized that a greatdeal of money could be made by col-lecting and selling ancient Egyptianartifacts of all kinds. He was so success-ful that Drovetti accused him of work-ing in areas where he had exclusiveconcessions to dig. Almost overnight,the two men became fierce, combativeopponents, with no holds barred oneither side.

Unlike his rival, Belzoni had agenius for making friends with the localpeople. He befriended the villagers ofQurna, who made their living by tombrobbing. In their company, he pene-trated deep into narrow caves wherehundreds of humbler ancient Egyptianswere buried. He soon became used tothe dust and filth, but received a rudeshock when he paused for a moment'srest on what he thought was a rockyperch. His seat collapsed in a mass ofbones and mummy bandages as hecrashed to the floor, having sat on adead Egyptian. The destruction and pil-laging was widespread; the tomb robberseven used wooden mummy cases forfirewood. Within a few months Belzonihad collected so many choice mummiesand artifacts that Drovetti's agents weremaking life difficult for him with veiledthreats of physical attack.

So Belzoni traveled far upstream,beyond the First Cataract at Aswan,the first set of rapids that interruptnavigation up the Nile. He then pro-ceeded into what the Egyptians calledNubia, "Land of the Blacks," a regionthat today is part of Sudan and south-east Egypt. His destination was thegreat temple of Abu Simbel, with itsenormous facade of seated figures ofRamses II overlooking the Nile River.Working almost single-handed amonghostile local people, Belzoni clearedthe sand from the long-hidden entranceand entered the shrine, hoping for

unimagined treasure. To his disappoint-ment the temple was empty.

In August 1817, Belzoni returnedto Qurna, where he started work in theValley of the Kings, the burial place ofEgypt's most celebrated rulers. By thistime, he had developed an instinctfor archaeological finds. Although thevalley had been known as a royal burialplace for 2,000 years, Belzoni soonfound the tomb of a son of King Ram-ses II, and the sepulcher of Ramses XI.He also located the magnificentlypainted burial place of the greatpharaoh Seti I, father of Ramses II,who died in 1278 BC.

Belzoni wanted to become rich,but above all famous. A fierce ambitionand ego drove him. The antiquities andstatuary he collected were worth enor-mous sums, but he collected them foranother reason—so he could displaythem to an adoring public. He realizedat once that Seti's tomb, with its finerock paintings, was the key to a trulysensational exhibit. Unlike constructedtombs such as the pyramids, this onewas cut into the rock and extendeddeep underground. It was empty exceptfor a superb alabaster sarcophagus, orcasket, with walls so thin that a candleon the inside shone through the sides.Belzoni spent the summer of 1818 mak-ing a complete copy of the sepulcherfor display in London, using castings ofwax mixed with dust and resin to copywall statues, and copying the lavishpaintings and hieroglyphic writing asfaithfully as possible.

There was no limit to Belzoni'sambitions. While collecting the moneyto copy Seti's tomb, he returned toCairo laden with artifacts of all kinds.Ever restless, he turned his talentedexcavator's mind to opening the hugepyramid of the pharaoh Kephren atGiza. The entrance was hidden under

GiovanniBattistaBelzoniBORN

November 5, 1778Padua, Italy

DIED

December 3, 1823Benin, West Africa

EDUCATION

Private

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

With tomb robbing and otheraggressive forms of archaeologyrecovered thousands of antiquitiesfrom Egypt, opened the templeof Abu Simbel, discovered andcopied the tomb of Seti I, andopened the Pyramid of Khephrenat Giza. Created great popular inter-est in ancient Egypt at a time whenlittle was known about early civi-lization on the Nile. Wrote Narra-tive of the Operations and RecentDiscoveries within the Pyramids,Temples, Tombs, and Excavationsin Egypt and Nubia (1822).

G I O V A N N I B A T T I S T A B E L Z O N I 3 1

Belzoni's men haul the statue of Ramsesto the Nile. With brilliant improvisation,Belzoni used palm trunks to lever theheavy sculpture onto a wooden carmounted on rollers. Hundreds of menthen hauled Ramses II to the bank ofthe Nile.

thick sand, a source of great frustrationto the local people and to Drovetti,who believed fabulous treasure layinside. Belzoni slipped away secretly toavoid his rivals, compared the positionof the entrance of the Pyramid ofKhufu with the base of the Kephrenpyramid, and started digging. After amonth's excavation with 80 men andthe judicious use of gunpowder, Belzonimade his way into the burial chamber.Unfortunately, it was empty except fora large stone sarcophagus. The frus-trated showman painted his name onthe wall with soot, where it can be seento this day.

By the time Belzoni had finishedcopying Seti Fs tomb, the rivalry withDrovetti was so intense that there wasa real danger of violence. After movinga fine obelisk from the Temple of Isisat Philae from under the very noses ofDrovetti's agents, Belzoni was ambushedby his rival's gang at Kamak. Shotswere fired. Belzoni escaped into thedesert, and searched unsuccessfully forthe ancient trading city of Berenice onthe Red Sea.

Exhausted and in fear of his life,Belzoni left Egypt laden with treasureand returned to England in 1820.There he was in his element. "The

famous traveler Mr. Belzoni," sodescribed by a London newspaper,charmed society with his good looksand broken English. He published abest-selling book on his discoveries andmounted a spectacular exhibition ofSeti's tomb in London that was a popu-lar sensation. The show did well inParis also, and he became a famousman. But like all performers, he knewthat celebrity was fleeting and that thepublic would soon turn its attentionelsewhere.

As the Paris exhibition closed, heset off for West Africa in search of thesource of the Niger River, one of thegreat geographical prizes of the day.This time his luck ran out. GiovanniBelzoni died of dysentery in Benin, inwhat is now Nigeria, only a week afterlanding in West Africa in December1823. His lasting monument is theEgyptian Hall of the British Museum,where his finds can be seen to this day.

FURTHER READING

Fagan, Brian. The Rape of the Nile.Kingston, R.I.: Mover Bell, 1992.

Mayes, Stanley. The Great Belzoni, NewYork: Walker, 1961.


II

John Evans

THE A N T I Q U I T YOF H U M A N K I N D

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filled with remarkable people. He was a self-taught scientist and archaeologist who thoughtnothing of working in his paper mill all day, thenspending the evening searching for prehistoricartifacts in nearby plowed fields. Evans was a

man of great energy. He was fond of saying that he believedin "peace, prosperity, and papermaking." He was one of thefounders of modern prehistoric archaeology.

Born in 1823, at Burnham, Gloucester, in England,John Evans was the son of a parson and schoolteacher. Atage 16 he went to work in his uncle John Dickinson's papermill, learning the growing paper industry from the bottomup. He showed a natural aptitude for business. At the sametime, he started to collect ancient coins.

In 1850, Evans married Harriet Dickinson and becamea junior partner in his uncle's firm. Between 1850 and 1885,he turned John Dickinson and Company into one of the

By 1900, John Evans was an elder statesman of archaeology,revered for his vast knowledge of prehistoric artifacts. His beliefswere simple: "peace, prosperity, and papermaking." After all,peace and prosperity gave Evans an appropriate environmentfor his research.

J O H N E V A N S 3 3

ohn Evans was a remarkable man in a century

John Evans acquired these bronze spear-heads in Ireland.They were a feature of hislandmark study of prehistoric metal tools.

great European papermaking com-panies of the 19th century. Evans hadacquired an interest in science fromhis rambles through the countrysidewhen a young man. By constant studyand fieldwork squeezed between papermill business, he became a respectedand self-taught geologist and archaeol-ogist who moved in the highest scien-tific circles.

John Evans was a collector in thefinest sense of the word. During hislong life he traveled extensively onpapermaking business and used everyopportunity to add to his collection,visit archaeological sites, and make

geological observations. He lived acomfortable life in a house near hispaper mills, assembling a magnifi-cent collection of art, and above all,ancient artifacts of all periods. Evansbecame a noted coin expert whonot only acquired coins, but studiedtheir design and development. Healso collected prehistoric artifacts,among them stone tools of all kinds;Bronze Age pins, brooches, andweapons; and pottery. He publishedtwo authoritative monographs on thestone and bronze artifacts of theBritish Isles, based almost entirelyon his enormous collections.


By the 1850s, Evans was a respec-ted member of the British scientificestablishment at a time of momentouschange in archaeology and geology. Hewas a friend of biologists Charles Dar-win and Thomas Huxley, and of SirCharles Lyell, a geologist who was thefirst to popularize stratigraphic geol-ogy—the systematic observation andanalysis of the earth's geological layersformed through natural agencies likewind erosion and flooding. Lyell'sgeology helped Evans classify his stonetool collections and gave him an intel-lectual background for his most impor-tant research, which established thathumans had lived on earth long beforethe 6,000 years allowed by BishopUssher's Old Testament calculations.

In the mid-19th century, greatcontroversy surrounded what wascommonly called "the antiquity ofhumankind." This debate pitted pow-erful Anglican church authoritiesagainst scientists in a fight over theage of the first humans. At the time,many people still believed that Gene-sis, Chapter 1, was historical truth andthat the Creation had unfolded in4004 BC. They refused to accept scien-tific finds which showed that humanshad lived in Europe at the same timeas long-extinct animals like the mam-moth and woolly rhinoceros.

In 1858, John Evans served as amember of a special committee of theRoyal Society, which commissionedexcavations at Brixham Cave insouthwestern England to resolve thescientific problem. Brixham Cave wasimportant because the bones of extinctanimals like Ice Age elephants hadbeen found in its deposits in the samelayer as human-manufactured stone

tools. The finds lay under stalagmite,a layer of rock cemented by calciumcarbonate and water into concretelikehardness. This layer had sealed off theanimal remains and stone tools frombecoming mixed with later deposits.The bones and tools had first beenfound during excavations in 1823by a Catholic priest, Father JamesMcEnery. The geologists of that timehad explained the association of arti-facts and animals by theorizing thatthe ancient inhabitants of the cavehad dug pits for their tools into layersbelow the stalagmite layer. Evans andthe committee supervised new excava-tions, which found no traces of ancientstorage pits in the stalagmite. The sci-entists found no reason to doubt thatthe people who had made the BrixhamCave tools had lived at the same timeas the extinct animals whose boneswere found there.

The Brixham finds convincedmost of the scientific establishment,Evans among them, that humans hadflourished on earth much earlier than6,000 years ago. As the committee wasdebating the Brixham discoveries,news of new associations of animalbones and stone artifacts came fromAmiens in northern France. There,customs officer Boucher de Perthes,an amateur archaeologist, spent hisfree time combing the gravel quarriesby the Somme River for fossil bones.Over many years, he found finelymade stone axes in the same levels aselephant and hippopotamus bones,animals that had long vanished fromnorthern France.

His scientific colleagues greetedhis finds with scorn, but word of hisdiscoveries reached England. In May

John EvansBORN

November 17, 1823London, England

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Most prominent 19th-century col-lector of and international authorityon prehistoric and later artifacts ofthe 19th century; with geologistJoseph Prestwich, achieved scien-tific acceptance of the antiquity ofhumankind; Fellow of the Societyof Antiquaries and Royal Society;received Copley Medal of the RoyalSociety, Gold Medal of the Societyof Antiquaries. Wrote The AncientStone Implements, Weapons, andOrnaments of Great Britain (1872);The Ancient Bronze Implements,Weapons, and Ornaments, of GreatBritain and Ireland (1881).

J O H N E V A N S 3 5

DIED

May 31, 1908Nash Mills, England

EDUCATION

Private

"This much appears established beyond doubt, that in aperiod of antiquity remote beyond any of which we havehitherto found traces, this portion of the globe was peopledby man."

—John Evans, Archaeologia (1859)

1859, John Evans and geologist JosephPrestwich crossed the English Chan-nel, examined de Perthes' collections,and visited the gravel quarries. Evanshimself removed a stone axe from abone-bearing bed. He was now con-vinced that humans and extinct ani-mals had lived at this location longbefore 6,000 years ago. Back in Lon-don, the two scientists published areport of their findings, in which theypublicly accepted the idea of the greatantiquity of humankind. John Evansstated bluntly that humans and extinctanimals had coexisted on earth muchearlier than the Bible taught.

The scientific establishment wasconvinced by Evans's words, whichcame soon after the publication ofCharles Darwin's Origin of Species inthe same year. Darwin's great essayprovided a theoretical explanation asto how animals, including humans,had changed their forms gradually overimmensely long periods of time. JohnEvans's observations established thelong antiquity of humankind, andsince then have provided a practicalfoundation for all scientific study ofthe human past. Despite strong opposi-tion from within the church, the sci-ence of prehistoric archaeology cameinto being soon afterward.

Evans himself continued his archae-ological researches for the rest of his

life and published two authoritativereports on stone and bronze artifacts,which were a yardstick for future gen-erations of archaeologists. One ofhis greatest legacies came from hisyoungest son, Arthur John Evans, wholearned about antiquities at his father'sknee. From an early age, Arthur devel-oped a passion for art and artifacts,especially for brooches and seals fromMediterranean lands. In his old age,John Evans watched with pride as hisson discovered, then excavated, thePalace of Minos at Knossos on Cretein 1900. "Dies Greta Notanda" (a joy-ful day for Crete) he telegraphed toArthur, sending him £500 to helpfinance the excavations, an enormoussum in those days. John Evans was ableto visit the excavations and see theMinoan civilization firsthand beforehe died in 1908.

John Evans was one of the lastRenaissance men of archaeology. Hisknowledge and field experiencespanned the entire spectrum of thepast. He was not an excavator, but anartifact man, whose collections survivein Oxford University's AshmoleanMuseum for modern generations ofscholars to use in their research. Hewas one of the first archaeologists whohad the vision to look far back intothe past, to link Darwin's theory ofevolution and natural selection withan enormously long, and little-knownhuman prehistory. It is only now, acentury after his death, that we canbegin to appreciate the enormous com-plexity of the human past, somethingeven more complex than the visionaryJohn Evans realized.


FURTHER READING

Evans, Joan. Time and Chance. London:Longmans, 1943.

Jacob JensA. Worsaae

T H E T H R E EA G E S P R O V E D

acob Jens A.Worsaae nearly killed himself on hisfirst excavation, which would have deprivedarchaeology of one of its seminal figures. In 1837,he and an army officer friend investigated a4,000-year-old Stone Age tomb at Gronhojh,near Horsens, Denmark. The excavation almost

ended in disaster. The soldiers doing the heavy workshifted the massive stone roof, which collapsed. Worsaaescrambled out of the way just in time and lived to becomethe leading figure in Danish archaeology in the mid-19thcentury. Through excavation rather than museum work,this energetic and charismatic archaeologist proved withstratigraphic, or layer-analysis, geology that the Three AgeSystem accurately reflected the physical record of prehis-toric development.

Worsaae was born in Vejle, Denmark, in 1821. The sonof a wealthy official, he developed an interest in archaeol-ogy while still a young man. In an amazingly short time heaccumulated an extensive collection of prehistoric artifacts,some by purchase, others by excavating sites and visitingancient monuments.

Worsaae arrived in Copenhagen in 1838 and immedi-ately made himself known to Christian Jurgensen Thomsen,the director of the National Museum. He became a volun-teer, but the cautious Thomsen was suspicious of the dynamicand enterprising young man. Unlike his superior, Worsaaewas a fluent writer, and not afraid to criticize other archaeol-ogists. Unfortunately, his father fell ill and his family experi-enced bad times. Worsaae asked for a salary from the money-conscious Thomsen, who refused the request althoughlonger-serving volunteers received pay. His young assistantresigned immediately and found a new patron in King Chris-tian VIII, who paid for his trip to a famous runic inscriptionat Runamo in Sweden. (Runes are an early European scriptof the 3rd century AD.) The 23-year-old Worsaae promptlyshowed that the "runes" were in fact natural cracks, much tothe amusement of His Majesty. The king now asked him towrite a short survey of the early history of Denmark. Theresult was a book titled The Primeval Antiquities of Denmark,first published in 1843 and translated into English in 1849.

This small but bold book began with a daring statement:"It is inconceivable that a nation which cares about itselfand its independence could rest content without reflectingon its past." Lucidly, Worsaae discussed Thomsen's three agesin terms of Danish prehistory, described prehistoric burialmounds and artifacts, and summarized recent research. Thearguments and conclusions of Primeval Antiquities expressedWorsaae's nationalistic conviction that the Danish nation

J A C O B J E N S A . W O R S A A E 3 7

J

The Bronze Age burial mound at Kivik,Sweden, also called Breda Rohr, dates toabout 1400 BC. It is one of Scandinavia'smost celebrated prehistoric sites becauseof its excellent state of preservation.Thecentral burial chamber bears rock carv-ings, which are enlarged at bottom right.

had deep roots in prehistory. The closeties with contemporary Danes evokedby Worsaae struck a sympathetic chordwith the Danish public in the 1840s, asnationalist sentiments were runninghigh in a tiny country engaged in aferocious rivalry with a neighboringkingdom, Schleswig-Holstein. "Theland can constantly remind us of thefact that our fathers, a free independentpeople, have dwelt from time immemo-rial in this country," Worsaae wrote inhis book, which was brilliant propa-ganda for the young science of archae-ology. He repeatedly linked ancientmonuments and excavations with themajor historical issues of the day.

King Christian VIII was impressedand sent his young protege on a studytour of Viking sites in Britain andIreland in 1846 and 1847. An acute

observer, Worsaae was struck by thestrong similarities between Viking arti-facts from the British Isles and thosefrom Scandinavia. He acquired exam-ples of closely similar artifacts andbrought them back to Copenhagenfor more direct comparison. From thisresearch he wrote another book, AnAccount of the Danes and the Norsemenin England, Scotland, and Ireland, whichappeared in 1852. This account of avigorous and sophisticated culturethat once flourished on both sidesof the North Sea drew on an astonish-ing range of archaeological and his-torical sources.

Even before the book appeared,Worsaae's energetic researches wererewarded with a new post. He becameInspector for the Conservation of Anti-quarian Monuments on his return from


Britain in 1847. This demandingappointment involved making inven-tories of archaeological sites, attempt-ing to save them from damage or lossby new construction, and directingthe conservation of major monuments.The work kept him traveling con-stantly. He also excavated numerousburial mounds and other sites, manyof them spectacular Stone Age andBronze Age sepulchers where the deadlay with their finest possessions, includ-ing swords and shields, fine clay vessels,and clothing made from animal skin.Worsaae's many excavations providednew evidence from actual sites thatvalidated Christian Jurgensen Thom-sen's Three Age System, which untilthen had been based on museum col-lections alone.

As Inspector of Antiquarian Mon-uments, Worsaae also served as a mem-ber of a three-scientist commissionresponsible for investigating prehistoricmounds of empty mollusk shells accu-mulated by ancient shellfish-eatinginhabitants along Danish coasts. Work-ing with a geologist and a zoologist,Worsaae examined many such mounds,called shell middens, and excavated alarge mound found during road-makingnear Meilgaard in east Jutland. Heremoved a large section of the midden,observing thick layers of oyster shellsand mussels, where he also found antlerspearheads, stone tools, hearths, andother traces of human occupation. Wor-saae described the mounds as "somekind of eating place." They soon becamecalled "kitchen middens" in contempo-rary scientific literature.

The simple antler and stone toolsfrom the mounds were cruder thanthose from later Stone Age burialmounds, allowing Worsaae to divide

the Danish Stone Age into two stages.The earlier period of the shell middenswas a culture of simple hunters andfisherfolk, the later stage was markedby farming. His geological and zoologi-cal colleagues studied ancient climatechanges using layers of peat bogs andthe vegetable remains in them, animalbones, and shells. Zoologist JapetusSteenstrup was even able to use birdbones to establish in which seasons ofthe year the mounds were occupied.This research made Worsaae acutelyaware of the importance of studyingancient environments a century beforesuch approaches became commonplacein archaeology.

In 1855, Worsaae began teachingat the University of Copenhagen, thefirst professional teacher of prehistoryin Scandinavia. He resigned in 1866when he became Director of theNational Museum of Denmark, whilestill retaining his inspector's position.He used his considerable diplomaticand administrative skills to obtain agovernment grant in 1873 for the sys-tematic inspection and eventual pro-tection of Danish antiquities. Thissurvey was the first of this type evercarried out. An archaeologist and adraftsman were assigned to each areaof the country. Their work produced aconsiderable body of valuable archaeo-logical information from all parts ofDenmark. Worsaae also proposed theestablishment of a corps of regionalinspectors that would assume responsi-bility for protecting monuments in allparts of the country. Unfortunately, thisinnovative proposal was never imple-mented, for it was far ahead of its day.

Worsaae remained a pivotal figurein Danish archaeology for the restof his life. He reorganized the royal

Jacob JensA. WorsaaeBORN

March 14, 1821Vejle, Denmark

DIED

August 15, 1885Copenhagen, Denmark

EDUCATION

University of Copenhagen(1738-41)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Established the validity of C. J.Thomsen's Three Age Systemthrough archaeological excavationand stratigraphic observation;linked the prehistory of Denmarkand the Vikings to recent Danishhistory; established the basic stratig-raphy of the Danish Stone Age; firstteacher of archaeology in Denmark;director of the National Museum.Wrote The Primeval Antiquities ofDenmark (1849); An Account of theDanes and Norwegians in England,Scotland, and Ireland (1852).

J A C O B J E N S A . W O R S A A E 3 9

"The relics of prehistory strengthen our links to theFatherland."—Jacob Jens A. Worsae, The Primeval Antiquitiesof Denmark (1849)

collections and constantly rearrangedthe National Museum displays toreflect the latest scientific thinking.Under his directorship the museum wasa lively place where many young stu-dents worked enthusiastically, unitedin a passion for archaeology, but withWorsaae's approval to disagree withone another. Worsaae's enormous com-parative knowledge and lively imagina-tion allowed him to put forwardprovocative theories for testing in thefield. He had fingers in many pies. In1874 and 1875 he served as Minsterfor Education and Ecclesiastical Affairsand displayed an unexpected flairfor administration.

Unfortunately, this remarkable pio-neer of European archaeology died sud-denly in 1885, at the height of his pow-ers. He left behind an extraordinarylegacy of archaeological research thatplaced the prehistory of Scandinaviaand much of northern Europe on itsfirst scientific footing. Worsaae provedthe scientific validity of the Three AgeSystem and laid the foundations for themore detailed artifact studies of OscarMontelius and others who followed inhis footsteps (see Part 3).

FURTHER READING

Daniel, Glyn. A Short History of Archaeol-ogy. London: Thames and Hudson, 1981.

Fagan, Brian M. The Adventure of Archae-ology. Washington, D.C.: National Geo-graphic Society, 1985.

Klindt-Jensen, Ole. A History of Scandina-vian Archaeology. London: Thames andHudson, 1973.


iego de Landa (1524-79) was a Franciscanfriar who became bishop of the Yucatanterritory in what was then New Spain.Notorious as a persecutor of the Indiansthere, he nevertheless admired ancient

Maya ruins and attributed them to native Central Ameri-cans. He also studied the intricate Maya hieroglyphs andsucceeded in deciphering some of them four centuriesbefore modem scholars. His Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan(unpublished until 1864) is a classic source of informationon the ancient Maya.

William Camden (1551-1623) was a schoolmaster,antiquary, and historian. He spent much of his leisure timetraveling through Britain describing the landscape and antiq-uities. His Britannia, published in 1586, was the first compre-hensive topographic survey of the British Isles. Camden was

This engraving of Stonehenge from William Camden's Britannia(1609) is one of the earliest known illustrations of an excavation.It is probably not entirely accurate: at bottom left, diggersunearth what appears to be a giant's bones from a grave.

M O R E A R C H A E O L O G I S T S T O R E M E M B E R 4 1

MoreArchaeologiststo Remember

D

the first archaeologist to use telltalemarks in growing crops to trace theburied streets of a Roman town, Call-eva Atrebatum, near present-day Silch-ester, in Hampshire, England.

John Aubrey (1626-97), an Eng-lish landowner and antiquary, made thefirst systematic examination of theAvebury stone circles in southern Eng-land. Aubrey considered Avebury to bethe work of ancient Britons who were"two or three degrees less savage thanthe Americans." By "Americans" hemeant Native Americans, whose exoticcustoms were the subject of intensecuriosity at the time. The Aveburypriests, he said, "were Druids."

William Hamilton (1730-1803),antiquarian and collector, served asBritish Ambassador to the Kingdoms ofNaples and Sicily (the Two Sicilies) in1764-1800. Hamilton was a man ofmany skills and was a well-known artcollector. He accumulated two out-standing collections of Greek andRoman vases, including the celebratedPortland Vase, a Roman masterpiece,which is now in the British Museum.His books on such artifacts were influ-ential and inspired the English potterJosiah Wedgwood.

Carsten Niebuhr (1733-1815),astronomer and mathematician, wasappointed engineer-lieutenant of aDanish expedition to Arabia in 1761.He was the first Westerner to visit theremains of the ancient Persian city atPersepolis, burned by Alexander theGreat. Niebuhr studied the wedgelikecuneiform inscriptions on the palacewalls and brought some of the firstexamples of the script back to Europe.He was among the first foreigners tovisit the ruins of Babylon and Nineveh.

William Bartram (1739-1823)was a Philadelphia botanist and nurs-eryman. From 1773 to 1777, he made a

long journey through the southeasternUnited States, collecting botanicalspecimens and making detailed obser-vations of Creek and Cherokee NativeAmericans. He also visited numerousearthworks, including the Mount Royalmound near the St. John's River inFlorida. He wrote two books, anaccount of the Creek and Cherokee(1815) and Travels (1791), a remark-ably accurate description of still-surviving Native American culturesand archaeological sites.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826),third President of the United States,achieved archaeological fame in 1781when he excavated a Native Americanburial mound on his estate at Monti-cello, Virginia. Jefferson was one of thefirst excavators anywhere to observeand record stratified layers in an archae-ological site. He noted the distinctivestrata of human bones and concludedthat burials had been deposited thereby local Native Americans over manygenerations in the past.

William Cunnington (1754-1810) was a wool merchant with apassion for excavating burial mounds.Between 1803 and 1810 he excavatedhundreds of such monuments in south-ern England, but was unable to makesense of his finds, as he lacked a meansof classifying them. Cunnington's exca-vation methods were brutal at best, andhe would sometimes open two or threemounds in a day.

Sir Richard Colt Hoare (1758-1838) was a banker and large land-owner in southern England whobecame interested in antiquities afterthe tragic death of his wife and child.He financed William Cunnington'sburial mound digs and studied thefinds. His book The Ancient Historyof Wiltshire (1810) admitted defeat:he was unable to establish who had


built the barrows around Stonehenge.He believed they were the work of"the first colonists of Britain." But theartifacts found in his burial recordswere a rich source of information forlater investigators.

Rasmus Nyerup (1759-1829) wasa Danish philosopher and natural sci-entist who held a professorship at theUniversity of Copenhagen. He servedas the Secretary of the Danish Antiqui-ties Commission, established in 1806,and was responsible for the founding ofthe National Museum of Denmark in1807. He was also well known for hiswritings on antiquities, in which heargued that prehistoric times had begunwith a Stone Age, followed by Bronzeand Iron ages. Nyerup's scheme wasentirely theoretical, but laid the foun-dations for Christian Jurgensen Thom-sen's Three Age System.

Caleb Atwater (1778-1867)became postmaster of Circleville,Ohio, in 1815. He devoted his leisuretime to studying the mysterious earth-works and burial mounds in the OhioValley. Atwater's description of thesesites, published by the AmericanAntiquarian Society in 1820, wasthe first serious study of the NorthAmerican mound builders. He falselyattributed most of them not to NativeAmericans, but to a numerous pop-ulation of shepherds and farmers fromIndia and China.

Claudius Rich (1787-1831) wasappointed British Resident, the officialBritish diplomatic representative, inBaghdad at age 22. Rich was the first tomake a systematic map of biblical KingNebuchadnezzar's Babylon. In 1820he spent five months examining andmapping the ruins of biblical Nine-veh, where he recovered cuneiform-inscribed bricks and heard stories offine stone relief carvings of people and

animals. His work laid the foundationsfor major discoveries a generation later.

Jacques Boucher de Perthes(1788-1868) served as a customs offi-cer at Abbeville in northern France.He spent his spare time searching thequarries in the nearby Somme Rivergravel for human artifacts and fossilanimal bones. His claims that the twooccurred in the same gravel layers andwere evidence for the antiquity ofhumankind were ignored until vali-dated by English scientists John Evansand Joseph Prestwich in 1859.

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-95), was a major British biologist andteacher who championed Charles Dar-win's theories of evolution and naturalselection. He was responsible for thefirst scientific description of the prehis-toric skull with a large, overhangingbrow found in Germany's NeanderValley in 1856, from which the classi-fication Neanderthal Man derives.In his Man's Place in Nature (1863),Huxley compared the Neanderthalremains to the skeletons of apes andmodern humans. He recognized thatchimpanzees were our closest livingprimate ancestors.

Richard Colt Hoare and WilliamCunnington supervise the excavationof a mound on Salisbury Plain, England.The two excavators worked withlightning speed, opening two or threebarrows a day.

M O R E A R C H A E O L O G I S T S T O R E M E M B E R 43

When Napoleon Bonaparte and his troops landed in Egypt in 1798, Napoleon sought to learn as much as possible about the country.His explorations uncovered the Rosetta Stone, which enabled scholars to decipher hieroglyphics, a form of ancient Egyptian writing.


Finding LostCivilizations

The 19th century was an era of romantic discovery and high adven-ture in pursuit of long-forgotten civilizations. If ever there was aliving rather than fictional Indiana Jones, he flourished during thetime when the Assyrians, the Maya, and other ancient civilizations

were revealed to an astonished world.When General Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, he took 40

scientists with his army, with instructions to study this little-known country,ancient and modern. The scientists returned with the Rosetta Stone, whichenabled the deciphering of the mysterious ancient Egyptian picturelike writingcalled hieroglyphics, and a myriad of lesser finds. The great book of their scien-tific reports, Description de l'Egypte, published in several volumes between 1809and 1821, revealed an exotic, totally unfamiliar civilization. A passion for thingsEgyptian led both Britain and France to appoint consuls to Egypt, who wereinstructed to collect as much as they could for museums at home. Tomb robbersGiovanni Belzoni, Bernardino Drovetti, and others rampaged through Egypt'stemples and tombs and did incalculable damage. Fortunately for science, French-man Jean Fran£ois Champollion deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822,which set the stage for the serious study of ancient Egypt. Soon, a handful ofscholars worked alongside the treasure hunters, among them Englishman JohnGardner Wilkinson, who worked for years deciphering inscriptions while livingin ancient tombs. He wrote the first popular account of daily life among theancient Egyptians. Later in the 19th century, the first full-time Egyptologistsworked along the Nile, among them the Frenchman Auguste Mariette and theGerman scholar Karl Richard Lepsius, who led a major expedition to Egypt from1842 to 1845.

In 1840, the French government, anxious to repeat its triumphs in Egypt,appointed Paul Emile Botta its consul in the remote town of Mosul on the TigrisRiver in what is now northern Iraq. The community had one claim to fame—it lay across the river from what was thought to be ancient Nineveh. Two yearsafter his arrival, Botta dug into Nineveh without success. In 1843, one of hisworkers reported the discovery of carved figures at Khorsabad a short distanceupstream. Within a few days, Botta unearthed the remains of a palace with wallsadorned with bearded men in long gowns, armies, and exotic animals. Botta

JOHN LLOYD STEPHENS

AUSTEN HENRY LAYARD

HENRY CRESWICKERAWLINSON

AUGUSTE MARIETTE

CHARLES WARREN

HEINRICH SCHLIEMANN

F I N D I N G L O S T C I V I L I Z A T I O N S 4 5

2

announced that he had found Nineveh, when he had, in fact, discovered the palaceof the Assyrian King Sargon II, who reigned from 721 to 701 BC. The Assyrians wereknown from the Second Book of Kings in the Old Testament as a fierce people whohad attacked Israel. Botta's discoveries caused a sensation in Paris. A lavish expedi-tion was mounted to dig at Khorsabad.

A young Englishman named Austen Henry Layard had visited Botta in 1842while on his way by land from England to India. An adventurous and restless youngman, Layard became fascinated by archaeology and desert life while in Mosul andBaghdad. He abandoned his journey, spent a year among the Bakhtiari nomads ofhighland Iran, then became a secret agent attached to the British Embassy in Con-stantinople. In 1845, Layard began excavations at the city of Nimrud (the biblicalCalah) downstream of Mosul, where he found two Assyrian royal palaces. At first hethought Nimrud was Nineveh, but when he dug at the Kuyunjik mounds oppositeMosul, he discovered the real biblical city. Thanks to Botta and Layard, the Assyri-ans became a historical reality, not just a shadowy reference in the Scriptures. Layardwas a gifted writer whose books on his excavations are still in print a century and ahalf later. He was helped in his interpretations by the cuneiform studies of HenryRawlinson and others, who deciphered palace inscriptions and clay tablets for him.Layard was followed by his protege Hormuzd Rassam, who carried out further exca-vations at Kuyunjik and elsewhere with important results.

Layard's most important discovery was the royal library of King Assurbanipal(668-627 BC) at Nineveh: thousands of cuneiform-inscribed clay tablets that heshoveled into baskets and sent to the British Museum in London. In 1872, GeorgeSmith, a young bank engraver with a passion for cuneiform, identified a legendremarkably similar to the biblical Noah's flood on one of the king's tablets. Thefind caused a sensation, for it seemed to prove the historical truth of the Scriptures.

The Bible and the Greek and Roman classics still drove much archaeologicalthinking in Layard's day. The popular obsession with the Scriptures led to the firstinvestigations under the holy city of Jerusalem by engineer officer Charles Warren.These were hazardous excavations carried out in tunnels that traced the outline ofmuch of the city walls. Warren was one of the founders of biblical archaeology,which flourishes to this day.

Ever since the first conquistadors landed in New Spain, scholars had speculatedabout the origins of the first Americans. Had they arrived by sea, or by land fromAsia? The discovery of the Bering Strait by Vitus Bering in 1743 focused attentionon an Asian ancestry for Native Americans. Meanwhile, speculations came fast andfaster, especially after crowds of settlers crossed the Allegheny Mountains from theeast and entered the Ohio and Mississippi valleys in the 1820s. They found them-selves surrounded by mysterious earthworks, enclosures, and burial mounds. Noneother than Thomas Jefferson, future President of the United States, puzzled over themounds, as did generations of antiquaries. The first serious inquiries came at thehands of the Circleville postmaster Caleb Atwater, then with the surveys of EphraimSquier and Edwin Davis from 1845 to 1847.

Squier and Davis's report, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1847, isstill the only source of accurate plans of now-destroyed earthworks. The two menwere convinced that Native Americans were incapable of such sophisticated con-struction, which they attributed to "Mound Builder peoples." A platoon of popularwriters like Cornelius Mathew and Josiah Priest wrote epic stories of long-forgottenmound-builder civilizations that inhabited the Midwest long before Native Ameri-cans settled there. The books sold well, but were based on racist assumptions ofwhite superiority.


Some scholars thought otherwise. In 1856, a wise and sober archaeologist namedSamuel Haven pointed out that Native Americans had lived in their homeland for avery long time. Furthermore, they had Asian physical characteristics. But it was notuntil the 1890s that a massive campaign of excavation and survey headed by CyrusThomas of the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology proved beyond alldoubt that the mounds were the work of Native Americans, the ancestors of recenttribal groups.

As speculation over the mound builders continued, an American traveler, JohnLloyd Stephens, and Scottish artist Frederick Catherwood penetrated deep into therainforests of the Yucatan Peninsula in Central America. They had heard rumors ofancient cities lost in the jungle from sporadic reports by returning travelers. LikeLayard, Stephens was a brilliant writer, who entranced a wide public with accountsof his adventures. The two men traveled to the Maya city of Copan in 1839, thenexplored Palenque, Uxmal, and other Maya cities in this and a later journey. Bothtrips resulted in best-selling books, and separate folios of superb drawings by Cather-wood of Maya sites and art works that were almost as accurate as photographs.Most important of all, Stephens proclaimed his newfound cities to be the work notof foreigners from across the Atlantic, but of the ancestors of the Maya people stillliving in the region in his day. All Maya research has proceeded from this assump-tion ever since.

Most educated people of the mid- to late 19th century received an education inthe classics. These included the writings of the Greek poet Homer, who wrote hisepics, the Iliad and the Odyssey in the 9th century B.C. But were these great adven-ture stories a true reflection of history? German businessman turned archaeologistHeinrich Schliemann was determined to find out. After making a fortune, he trainedhimself in archaeology and the classics. In 1871, he excavated the great mounds ofHissarlik in northwestern Turkey, which he believed to be the city of Troy besiegedby the Greeks in the Iliad. Using huge gangs of laborers, he unearthed one city afteranother, declaring the sixth to be Homeric Troy. Schliemann was not entirely hon-est. He claimed to have found a single, fabulous treasure trove of rich golden orna-ments, which he displayed on his lovely Greek wife, Sophia. In fact, the finds camefrom several levels of the site. After several seasons at Hissarlik, he turned his atten-tion to the fortress and tombs at Mycenae in southern Greece. He soon found aseries of magnificently decorated chieftain's burials adorned with gold face masks.These he proclaimed to be those of King Agamemnon and his compatriots from theIliad. Later scholarship has shown that the Mycenae burials were much earlier thanHomer's day.

Schliemann was the classic archaeological adventurer—single-minded, deter-mined to find spectacular artifacts, and unconcerned about the damage he causedalong the way. But archaeology was changing by the time he dug into Mycenae.A new generation of much more careful excavators was beginning to transformarchaeology from a glorified treasure hunt into a meticulous science. When Schlie-mann resumed work at Hissarlik from 1882 to 1890, he had German archaeologistand architect Wilhelm Dorpfeld working alongside him to add scientific rigor tohis excavations.

The last of the heroic discoveries came in 1912, when Yale historian turnedarchaeologist Hiram Bingham traveled up Peru's Urubamba River in search of the"Lost City of the Incas." He stumbled on the mountain ruins of Macchu Picchu, awell-preserved outlier center of Inca civilization. But his claim that this was the lastInca city has been proven wrong. Another stone-built settlement on the eastern sideof the Andes Mountains was the last Inca refuge from Spanish conquistadors.

F I N D I N G L O S T C I V I L I Z A T I O N S 4 7

John LloydStephens

C H R O N I C L E R OFTHE A N C I E N T MAYA

John Lloyd Stephens introduced the ancient Maya worldto the people of the 19th century. Stephens had heardrumors of ruins deep in the Central American rainforestand set off on an expedition of discovery.

ot many archaeologists have revealed anentire ancient civilization to an astonishedworld. John Lloyd Stephens, archaeologistand traveler, had that opportunity, as wellas the talent to write vivid tales about his

experiences as well. He described long-forgotten Maya cities,where he walked through deserted plazas under the canopyof the rainforest, with the earthen heights of surroundingpyramids vanishing into the trees above.

Stephens was born in Shrewsbury, New Jersey, in 1805,the son of a wealthy New York merchant. He enteredColumbia University in 1818, at the early age of 13, wherehe received an education in Greek and Latin and a soundgrounding in literature. He graduated in 1821. Columbiagave him an endless curiosity about the world, which com-pelled him to pursue an active and adventure-filled life.

Stephens attended Tapping Reeves's Law School inLitchfield, Connecticut, graduating in 1824. But instead ofbeing sworn in as a counselor at law, he took a long journeywest to visit distant relatives in Illinois. At the time, thiswas frontier country, with thousands of people moving acrossthe Allegheny Mountains into the Midwest in covered wag-ons. Stephens rode from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati, then wentby steamer to Louisville before taking a trail to the tiny set-tlement of Carmi, Illinois. When he left Carmi he continueddown the Mississippi River to New Orleans. The entire jour-ney gave Stephens a taste of traveling in the wild. Now anexperienced traveler, he returned to New York in 1825 andgained admittance to the bar, becoming involved in the fam-ily's Wall Street business. Stephens was a convincing andarticulate speaker who soon became much in demand forpolitical activities such as Andrew Jackson's presidentialcampaign of 1828. He developed a throat infection fromexcessive public speaking. The family doctor recommendedan extended trip through Europe as a cure. Never enthusias-tic about the law, Stephens left for his second long journeyin 1835 and never practiced again.

Stephens passed rapidly through Paris and Rome, visit-ing the usual tourist spots. He next traveled to Greece, thenacross Russia to Moscow and St. Petersburg in a wagon,before returning to Paris through Poland. Browsing througha bookstall, he came across a book about the mysterious andlittle-known rock-cut city of Petra in distant Syria. Hepromptly decided to go there, first journeying up the NileRiver by boat to visit ancient Egyptian ruins. By the time hereturned to Cairo, he was an expert desert traveler, wearingArab costume and going by the name of Abdul Hasis. Thisdisguise enabled him to cross the Sinai Desert, where he


N

nearly died of thirst, and to enter Petraunscathed after paying a large bribeto the local sheikh. Stephens was soentranced by Petra's temples that hedeveloped a serious interest in archae-ology almost overnight. He wrote inhis book about these travels: "The firstview of that superb facade must pro-duce an effect which would never goaway. Even [after I] returned to thepursuits and thought-engrossing inci-dents of a life in the busiest city in theworld ... I see before me the facade ofthat temple."

He went back to New York byway of Jerusalem, Alexandria, Egypt,and London, to find himself famous.Friends had published some of his let-ters in New York newspapers, whichsoon became his first book, Incidents ofTravel in Arabia Petraea, published in1837. Incidents was an immediate best-seller, with a vivid and easy style and apleasing sense of humor that disguisedthorough research and impressivescholarship. He promptly wrote a sec-ond book' about his travels in Greeceand Russia, which appeared in 1839and enjoyed equal success. Stephensdescribed 2,000 miles of bouncingtravel in a wagon with no springs fromOdessa on the Black Sea to Moscow.He was "obliged to strip naked" forcustoms examination.

While writing these books in NewYork, Stephens met the Scottish artistFrederick Catherwood, who sharedhis passion for ancient civilizations.Catherwood had traveled widely inEgypt and the Holy Land, and enjoyeda considerable reputation for his evoca-tive drawings of ancient ruins. Cather-wood drew Stephens' attention tosome little-known publications thatdescribed mysterious ruins in CentralAmerica. Sensing a unique opportu-nity, Stephens wangled a Presidentialappointment as American charge d'af-fairs in Central America to give legiti-macy to an expedition to the rain-forests of Guatemala and Mexico.

In October 1839, Stephens andCatherwood sailed for Izabal in Guate-mala, where they set off inland withfive mules. After a difficult journeythrough rough country, they arrivedat the remote village of Copan, wherethey saw well-preserved stone wallsacross the river. The next day theyexplored the overgrown Maya city,silent except for "monkeys movingalong the tops of the trees." Few ancientcities have ever been described so elo-quently. Stephens wrote: "The city wasdesolate. No remnant of this race hangsround the ruins. ... It lay before us likea shattered bark in the midst of theocean." Meanwhile, Catherwood stoodcopying the intricate carvings on theweathered stone columns set in Copan'sgreat plaza. Stephens wanted to buyCopan and ship it back to New Yorkpiece by piece. However, the river wasunsuitable for rafts, so he contentedhimself with buying the site for $50,the bargain of the century.

While Catherwood stayed behindto draw the ruins, Stephens traveledon to Guatemala City, where he foundpolitical chaos. He embarked on a1,200-mile diplomatic journey toSan Salvador and Costa Rica beforerejoining Catherwood. The two menreturned home across a huge area ofGuatemala that took them a thousandmiles northeastward to another greatMaya city, Palenque. Virtually indistin-guishable from the local people, withbroad-brimmed hats and Spanishcostume, they rode through rebel-infested country torn by civil war, find-ing their way with difficulty throughthick forest. Palenque was worth thejourney, despite heavy rain and thou-sands of mosquitoes.

They recorded details of the palacewith its "spirited figures in bas-relief,"made a plan of the site, and admiredthe fine art, which reminded themof ancient Egypt. It was then thatStephens realized that Palenque's artnot only was unique, but was the

John LloydStephensBORN

November 28, 1805Shrewsbury, New Jersey

DIED

October 12, 1852New York, New York

EDUCATION

Columbia College, New York(B.A. 1821)Tapping Reeve's Law School,Litchfield, Connecticut (L.L.D.1824)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Became famous as a travel writerafter extensive journeys in Europeand the eastern Mediterranean,including the city of Petra; traveledthrough Yucatan Peninsula andmajor Maya cities with FrederickCatherwood; was the first person toattribute Maya ruins to the ances-tors of the modern native popula-tion of the region; brought ancientMaya civilization to a wide audi-ence. Wrote Incidents of Travel inCentral America, Chiapas, andYucatan (1841); Incidents of Travel inYucatan (1843).

J O H N L L O Y D S T E P H E N S 4 9

"To men of leisure and fortune, jaded with rambling over theruins of the Old World, a new country will be opened. Aftera journey on the Nile, a day in Petra, and a bath in theEuphrates, English and American travelers will be bitten bymosquitoes on the lake of Nicaragua."

—John Lloyd Stevens, Incidents of Travel in CentralAmerica, Chiapas, and the Yucatan (1841)

work of the ancestors of the localpeople. "It is a spectacle of a peopleoriginating and growing up here . . .having a distinct, separate, and indige-nous existence," he wrote. All Mayaarchaeology is based on his carefullyreasoned conclusion.

After a quick visit to the nearbyMaya site at Uxmal, the explorersreturned to New York in July 1840,after a 10-month journey. Nine monthslater, Incidents of Travel in CentralAmerica, Chiapas, and Yucatan appearedto great acclaim. More than 20,000copies were sold in a few months. Thebook is still in print a century and ahalf later and is some of the finestwriting about Maya ruins ever penned.

In September 1841, Stephensand Catherwood again set sail for theYucatan Peninsula, this time withSamuel Cabot, a young physician. Forsix weeks they mapped and surveyedUxmal, arguably the most magnificentof all Maya ceremonial centers. Cather-wood's paintings and drawings ofUxmal were detailed enough to allowhim to build a replica if he wished, andare deservedly admired. From Uxmal,the party traveled to Kabah and otherMaya sites. They spent 18 days atChichen Itza in northeastern Yucatan.Stephens admired the Ball Court,which gave him another link betweenthe ancient and modern Maya, for

historical records of ancient ball gamessurvived. In these arenas, teams of play-ers tried to shoot a rubber ball througha hoop on the wall. The losers weresacrificed to the gods.

Stephens noted the close linksbetween Chichen Itza and other Mayasites like Uxmal, Cozumel, and Tulum.In June 1842, Stephens returned toNew York. Once again, just ninemonths later he published an accountof the trip, Incidents of Travel inYucatan, and once again he had pro-duced a bestseller. Stephens declaredthat the ruins of the area were builtby "the same races who inhabited thecountry at the time of the SpanishConquest." Then he wrote: "I leavethem with all their mystery aroundthem." With these words, John LloydStephens founded Maya archaeology.He never returned to the ruins, butbecame involved in a project to build atrans-Panama railroad in 1849. He diedin New York in 1852, as a result offever contracted in Central America.

John Lloyd Stephens broughtancient Maya civilization to the con-sciousness of the American public andkindled a lasting fascination with thesubject that still entices thousands ofvisitors to Central America every year.

FURTHER READING

Stephens, John Lloyd. Incidents of Travelin Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan.1841. Reprint, Washington, D.C.: Smith-sonian Institution, 1993.

von Hagen, Victor. Frederick Catherwood,Architect. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1950.

. Maya Explorer. Norman: Uni-versity of Oklahoma Press, 1947.

Willey, Gordon R., and Jeremy A. Sabloff.A History of American Archaeology. SanFrancisco: Freeman, 1980.


AustenHenryLayard

E X C A V A T O ROF N I N E V E H

usten Henry Layard had one of the shortestbut most spectacular archaeological careersof all time. He became an archaeologistby accident, achieved world fame for hisdiscoveries in Mesopotamia, then retired

from archaeology at age 36. Almost single-handed, heunearthed the palaces of the Assyrian kings at biblical Nin-eveh, discovering a flamboyant civilization mentioned inthe Old Testament.

Layard was bom in Paris in 1817, five years before JeanFran9ois Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs, the writingsystem of ancient Egypt. He was the son of impoverishedbut genteel English parents who enjoyed living abroad. Thefamily could not afford university fees, so Henry became aclerk in a relative's London law firm. For five years he liveda miserable existence. The dull and predictable career loom-ing ahead of him filled his heart with gloom.

Salvation came in 1839 when his uncle Charles, a highBritish official in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), suggested a lawcareer on that remote island. Henry joined Edward Mitford,a 32-year-old businessman, on an overland journey fromEurope to Constantinople, then through Syria, Jerusalem,and Baghdad to Persia, India, and on to Ceylon. In 1839such a journey was an expedition into the hazardousunknown. Had Mitford not been chronically seasick, andelected to travel overland, Layard would never have founda lost civilization and would probably have led a life ofrespectable anonymity.

The two men set out in July 1839. By the time theyarrived in Constantinople, Layard had fallen in love withthe Middle East. They lived off beans, bread, and fish roefor about four shillings a day (39 cents in today's money) asthey followed the centuries-old Roman route to Syria andJerusalem. Leaving Mitford in Jerusalem, Layard hired twocamels and rode across the desert to the remote rock-cutRoman caravan city at Petra in modern-day Jordan. He wasattacked and robbed of all his possessions, then held as ahostage, but was eventually released unharmed.

In April 1841, Layard and Mitford reached Mosul onthe Tigris River. Layard rode over the deserted mounds ofthe biblical city of Nineveh across the river. He wrote: "Des-olation meets desolation. A feeling of awe succeeds to won-der." He was soon obsessed with the notion of digging intoIraq's ancient mounds. For two months, he stayed withColonel James Taylor, the British consul in Baghdad, poringover clay tablets in the colonel's library that were coveredwith wedge-shaped cuneiform characters—the writing sys-tem of ancient Mesopotamian civilizations. Neither of them

A U S T E N H E N R Y L A Y A R D 5 1

A

Austen Henry Layard in Turkish nomaddress. Travelers often wore local dress sothat they drew less attention to them-selves. The flowing, loose-fitting robeswere also much cooler and more com-fortable than European clothes.

could decipher the tablets, but Layardbecame fascinated with archaeology.

By this time, Layard was addictedto adventure. He parted company fromMitford in Persia and spent a yearamong the fierce Bakhtiari nomadswandering with a chief whose son hecured of fever with quinine and a con-coction called "Dr. Dover's Powder."He took part in their skirmishes andwas captured by a cruel rival, but man-aged to escape and make his way toBaghdad dressed as a nomad.

For the next four years Layardserved as an unpaid, confidential assis-tant to Sir Stratford Canning, theBritish ambassador to Constantinople,who respected his knowledge of localaffairs. Layard relished his role as asecret agent, but never forgot the ruinsof Nineveh. Eventually he persuadedCanning to put up the funds for twomonth's excavations at the biblicalcity of Calah (Nimrud), downstreamof Mosul.

Nimrud consisted of a long lineof narrow mounds covering 900 acres(365 hectares), dominated by a cone-like pyramid, once a mud-brick temple.Layard started work in November 1845.He chose a spot at random. Withina few days he had found two royalpalaces. His first trenches entered thepalace of the great Assyrian king Assur-banipal (883-859 BC). The SouthwestPalace belonged to King Esarhaddon(680-669 BC), built on the ruins of yeta third royal residence constructed byKing Tiglath-Pileser (774-727 BC).Layard concentrated on spectacularfinds that would look good in museumdisplays, trenching along the walls ofthe palace rooms, where he found mag-nificent bas-reliefs—sculptures inwhich the figures project less than halftheir depth from the surface—depicting


military campaigns. He realized he ha Iunearthed an ancient biblical civiliza-tion fully as important as that of theancient Egyptians.

By May 1846 Layard had tunnele Ideep into Assurbanipal's palace. Hefound walls decorated with bas-reliefsof kings and horsemen, with servantsand scenes of the chase. Human-headedstone lions guarded the gates of thepalace. Working almost alone in tem-peratures as high as 117°F (47°C),he sketched each sculpture while hisworkmen sawed those he had alreadyrecorded out of the walls, transportedthem on buffalo carts to the nearbyTigris River, then loaded them on raftssupported by inflated goatskins for thelong journey to Basra on the PersianGulf. From there they went by steamerto the British Museum in London.

News of Layard's discoveries causedan immediate stir in England. "Theportly figures of kings and viziers, wenso lifelike, and carved in such truerelief, that they might be imagined tobe stepping from the walls," wrote journalist J. A. Longworth of the LondonMorning Post. The first loads of sculp-ture caused great excitement whenthey went on display in the BritishMuseum on June 25, 1847. Meanwhile,Layard closed his Nimrud excavationsand moved to the Kuyunjik moundopposite Mosul, which he suspectedwas the site of ancient Nineveh.

French diplomat Emile Botta hadpreviously dug there, found nothing,and moved upstream to the Assyriansite at Khorsabad, which he had pro-claimed to be Nineveh. Layard realized the Frenchman had not dug deep

enough into the mound. After amonth's hectic work, he uncoverednine rooms of a magnificent palaceadorned with scenes of a city siege.

the Frenchman had not dug deep

"Some who may hereafter tread on the spot when the grassagain grows over the ruins of the Assyrian palaces, mayindeed suspect that 1 have been relating a vision."

—Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains (1849)

Heavily armed men attacked with lad-ders and ramps as the defenders threwstones and boiling oil on them, but tono avail. In the bas-reliefs the attackersoverrun the beleagured city and kill andenslave the inhabitants in the presenceof the king. Layard suspected he hadfound Nineveh, but proof could onlycome from still-undeciphered tablets.

Exhausted and suffering frommalaria, Layard returned to London tofind himself the hero of the day. Hedined in great houses, lectured on hisexcavations, and wrote a "slight sketch,"as he called it, of his excavations. The"sketch" was a book titled Nineveh andIts Remains, which appeared in early1849 and became an instant bestseller.Layard was an enthusiastic and vividwriter. His excavations, and the ancientAssyrians themselves, came alive onevery page of this remarkable travel-ogue, which remains in print to this day.No one challenged Layard's claim thathe had revealed the "most convincingand lasting evidence of the magnifi-cence, and power, which made Nin-eveh the wonder of the ancient world."Until then, the Assyrians had beenknown only from the Second Bookof Kings in the Bible, fierce warriorswho had conquered Israel and put thecity of Lachish to the sword. AustenHenry Layard brought them out of his-torical oblivion.

The British Museum paid for moreexcavations at Khorsabad from 1849to 1850. Layard commuted betweenKhorsabad and Nimrud, where he metHenry Creswicke Rawlinson, the bril-liant cavalry officer and linguist whohad deciphered Assyrian cuneiform.Rawlinson had originally told himNimrud was Nineveh. Now he haddeciphered the royal inscriptions,changed his mind, and identified itas biblical Calah. Kuyunjik was thetrue Nineveh, he said. Layard soonuncovered a huge ceremonial hall124 feet long and 90 feet wide (38 by27.5 meters) at Kuyunjik, guarded bystatues of two human-headed bulls andadorned with bas-reliefs showing howfettered prisoners quarried, sculpted,and transported the bull-humans thatguarded the palace. An inscriptionread: "Sennacherib, King of Assyria.The great figures of bulls . . . whichwere made for his royal palace at Nin-eveh." Sennacherib's "Palace Withouta Rival" was built in 700 BC.

Layard excavated the 180-foot-long (55-meter) southeastern facade ofSennacherib's palace, also guarded byhuge bulls and gigantic human figuresand decorated with tales of the king'sconquests. The limestone slabs of theentrances still bore ruts from Assyrianchariot wheels. Another large chamberbore scenes of the siege and capture of

AustenHenryLayardBORN

March 5, 1817Paris, France

DIED

July 5, 1894Venice, Italy

EDUCATION

Private

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Became an expert on Assyrian andBabylonian civilization, and west-ern Asian and European art; exca-vated biblical Calah and Nineveh;unearthed historical evidence of theAssyrian civilization mentioned inthe Old Testament; served as Britishambassador to Madrid (1869-77)and Constantinople (1877-84).Wrote Nineveh and Its Remains(1849); Discoveries in the Ruins ofNineveh and Babylon (1853).

A U S T E N H E N R Y L A Y A R D 5 3

Layard (on left horse) and a local chieftain oversee the moving of the human-headed bull from Nimrud (in the background) to thebanks of the Tigris River Hundreds of workers hauled the crude wagon and its precious load to the riven where the cargo wasloaded onto a ship bound for London.

a heavily fortified city: The army campsbefore the walls, battering rams in place.The defenders put up a desperate resis-tance, but to no avail. Sennacheribhimself sits in judgment over the cap-tives. An inscription identified the cityof Lachish, part of Sennacherib's cam-paign mentioned in II Kings 18:13 inthe Bible. Huge bas-reliefs of the fishgod Dagon guarded small rooms con-taining thousands of cuneiform tablets,the royal archives of King Ashurbani-pal. Layard shoveled baskets of theminto six crates, knowing they wouldplace the scientific understanding ofthe Assyrians on a new footing. Clean-ing and deciphering the tablets wouldtake more than 50 years.

From Nineveh, Layard traveled toKing Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon, a mazeof dusty mounds and compacted, sun-dried mud brick. Layard's crude excava-tion methods were not up to the taskof tracing buildings or individual levelsin the mounds. He moved on to the

ancient city of Nippur, also in the low-lands of the Euphrates River delta, butwas equally unsuccessful. He returnedto London in July 1851 to great popularacclaim, was elected a member of Par-liament, and wrote a second bestseller,Nineveh and Babylon, which appearedtwo years later. This time he had thebenefit of cuneiform inscriptions; theseenabled him to write the first histori-cal account of Assyrian civilization,which he called "a kind of confedera-tion formed by many tributary states."

Austen Henry Layard gave uparchaeology after the publication ofNineveh and Babylon. He enjoyed along career as a politician and then adiplomat, becoming British ambassadorto Constantinople and Madrid. Eventu-ally he retired to Venice, where heindulged a lifelong passion for art. Bythe time he died in 1894, he rankedamong the archaeological immortals.

His achievements were staggering.Without any formal training, with little

money, and working almost single-handed without any special equipment,he unearthed a hitherto unknown civi-lization. He had a great archaeologist'sinstinct for the vital rather than thetrivial, and a nose for discovery thatled him unerringly to royal palaces andspectacular finds. His prodigious energymade up for his rough excavation meth-ods, which ignored small finds andindividual occupation levels. Unfortu-nately, no trained students stepped intoLayard's shoes. Half a century passedbefore scientifically trained excavatorsworked in Mesopotamia.

FURTHER READING

Pagan, Brian M. Return to Babylon. Boston:Little, Brown, 1979.

Larsen, Mogens Trolle. The Conquest ofAssyria. London: Routledge, 1994-

Lloyd, Seton. Foundations in the Dust. Rev.ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1980.


HenryCreswickeRawlinson

D E C I P H E R E R O FC U N E I F O R M S C R I P T

rilliant horseman, energetic Indian armyofficer, and highly gifted linguist: HenryCreswicke Rawlinson was a giant of 19th-century archaeology. He was one of ahandful of scholars who deciphered the

wedgelike cuneiform script of ancient Mesopotamia in the1840s. As part of this work, he was the first to identifythe biblical cities of Nineveh and Nimrud in present-daynorthern Iraq for what they were.

Like many eminent 19th-century scientists, HenryRawlinson rose from a relatively ordinary background tointernational prominence, in his case as a cavalryman, diplo-mat, traveler, and respected scholar. He was born in Oxford,England, in 1810. His father Abraham was a well-knownhorse breeder, so it was no surprise that Henry became anexcellent horseman at an early age. He was educated atWrington and Haling schools, where he excelled at both ath-letics and languages. His family background and intelligencemade him a natural candidate for an officer's commission inthe East India Company's service. He sailed for India in1827 at the age of 17, and there showed immediate promisein his profession. Rawlinson led two lives, one as a carefreeyoung officer who partied and engaged in sports of everykind, the other as a quiet scholar studying Asian languagesin his spare time. His natural talents for local languages andinfinite capacity for hard work soon qualified him as aninterpreter, which gave him unusual opportunities for serviceon remote frontiers. At the same time, he was respected forhis exceptional horsemanship. On one occasion, he rode 750miles (1,200 kilometers) in 150 hours to warn the officer incharge of an isolated outpost of the presence of a Russianagent. Rawlinson's ride was the stuff of legend. For years,British sporting magazines called his epic gallop the ride ofthe century.

Rawlinson had an infinite curiosity about exotic landsand continued to study new dialects. Increasingly, he becameinvolved in political issues and in 1835 was posted to Persia,where he explored the remote territory of Kurdistan. In 1838he was awarded the Royal Geographical Society of London'sgold medal for his explorations, reports of which were pub-lished by the society. During these travels, he visited theGreat Rock at Behistun, a huge rock surface adorned with avast ancient inscription commemorating Persian King Dar-ius's victory over rebels in 522 BC. Rawlinson gazed 400 feet(150 meters) upward at the trilingual inscription in Old Per-sian, Elamite, and Babylonian. He knew that scholars couldread many characters in Old Persian. If he could translatethe Persian, then he would have the key for deciphering

H E N R Y C R E S W I C K E R A W L I N S O N 5 5

B

Henry Creswicke Rawlinson at workdeciphering cuneiform, the early Meso-potamian script Rawlinson's brilliantdeciphering skills enabled him to puzzleout the intricacies of the wedgelike script

Babylonian cuneiform, at the time anuntranslated writing system.

Soon he was devoting every sparemoment to the difficult task of copyingthe Behistun inscriptions. The procla-mation was set high above the ground,as it was addressed to the gods inheaven, not to mere mortals. The taskof copying would have daunted evenan expert mountaineer. Rawlinsonscrambled all over the rock face duringthe next 12 years, using scaffolding andcrude ladders. Once he almost plungedto his death when the ladder he wasusing to span a chasm collapsed. Whenonly the most inaccessible lines of theinscription remained, he employedKurdish climbers, among them a nim-ble boy with nerves of steel who copiedthe last few words "by hanging on withhis toes and fingers."

In 1843 Rawlinson was appointedBritish consul in Baghdad, an idealposting for a scholarly man who neededplenty of undisturbed time for researchinto ancient scripts. He labored on theBehistun inscription, beginning withthe names of kings in the Old Persianscript. Soon he compiled an alphabet,then translated entire sentences. In1847 he published an important paper,"Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions atBehistun," in the journal of the Roy-al Asiatic Society, which was widelyaccepted as a reliable translation. Bythis time Rawlinson was working onBabylonian cuneiform in cooperationwith other experts, including an Irishparson named Edward Hincks, whowas the first to identify syllables incuneiform.

Once Rawlinson understood thepolyphonic nature of cuneiform (thecharacters represented more than onesyllable), he progressed rapidly. Soonhe could read about 150 characters andunderstand the meaning of some 200words of the language: Akkadian.

Rawlinson's Behistun work evokedgreat popular enthusiasm. His copiesand translations were hailed as the"Rosetta Stone" of cuneiform. Anycontroversy about his translation wassoon defused by the discovery of actualguides to Akkadian grammar on claytablets in the Royal Library of AssyrianKing Assurbanipal at Nineveh.

No cuneiform expert could engagein serious work without a steady streamof new inscriptions. Rawlinson's con-sular duties brought him in regularcontact with both Paul Emile Bottaand Austen Henry Layard, who wereengaged in large-scale excavations atKhorsabad, Nimrud, and Nineveh.He corresponded with Layard, visitedhis excavations, and used inscriptionsto identify the excavated cities andtheir palaces as Nineveh and biblicalCalah (Nimrud). This identificationtook Botta and the French by sur-prise, for they had announced thatKhorsa-bad, upstream of Mosul, wasthe true Nineveh.

It was Layard who, in 1850,unearthed a room filled with clay tab-lets in the library of King Assurbanipal.He promptly shoveled the pricelessfinds into wicker baskets for shipmentto London. Rawlinson picked throughthe baskets, the first person able to readthem in more than 2,500 years, andrealized their historical value at once.He wrote in high excitement that theycontained "the system of Assyrian writ-ing, the distinction between phonetic(sound-based) and ideographic (idea-symbolizing) signs. . . grammar of thelanguage, classification, and explana-tion of technical terms ... A thoroughexamination of the fragments wouldlead to the most curious results."

By this time, Rawlinson was ex-hausted by the hot climate in Baghdad.He returned to England on leave to findhimself a celebrity. In 1853 he resigned

A R C H A E O L O G I S T S5 6

"The Babylonian translation of the records of Darius . . .is almost of equal value for the interpretation of the Assyrianinscriptions as is the Greek translation on the Rosetta Stonefor the intelligence of the hieroglyphic scripts of Egypt."

—Henry Creswicke Rawlinson, from an 1852 lecture tothe Society of Antiquaries of London

from Baghdad and was rewarded with aknighthood and a lucrative directorshipof the East India Company.

Four years later, Rawlinson tookpart in a test of cuneiform decipher-ment devised by the Royal Asiatic Soci-ety, in which he, Edward Hincks, and athird expert, Frenchman Jules Oppert,were invited to submit independenttranslations of an unpublished, 810-lineinscription of Assyrian King Tiglath-Pileser I (1115-1077 BC). Two monthslater, a five-man learned committeebroke the seals of three envelopes andcompared the translations. The closesimilarities between the three versionsconvinced even skeptics that cuneiformhad been deciphered.

Following his retirement, Rawlin-son devoted his life to public service.He became a member of Parliamentand was actively involved in interna-tional diplomacy. He was to be seenaround the Department of OrientalAntiquities at the British Museum inLondon. There he patiently worked onThe Cuneiform Inscriptions of WesternAsia, a compendium of accurate copiesof cuneiform tablets. Generations ofstudents benefited from his long experi-ence and they refined the translationsof the pioneers. He served as presidentof the Royal Asiatic and Royal Geo-graphic societies and became a trusteeof the British Museum. Rawlinson died

in 1895 at the age of 85, the epitome ofa Victorian gentleman to the end.

Adventurer and dedicated scholar,Henry Creswicke Rawlinson was aloner who was often criticized for beingsecretive about his work. His work indeciphering cuneiform was the Meso-potamian equivalent of FrenchmanJean Francois Champollion's brilliantresearch on Egyptian hieroglyphs. "Loseno opportunity to be useful, whatevermay be the affair which may happen topresent the chance," Rawlinson oncewrote. "Grasp at everything, and neveryield an inch. Above all, never standon trifles." By all accounts, he lived hislife according to these rules.

FURTHER READING

Fagan, Brian M. Return to Babylon. Boston:Little, Brown, 1979.

Larsen, Mogens Tr011e. The Conquest ofAssyria. London: Routledge, 1994-

Rawlinson, George. Memoir of Major Gen-eral Sir Henry Rawlinson. London: Long-mans Green, 1898.

Rawlinson, Sir Henry Creswicke. Englandand Russia in the East. 1875. Reprint, NewYork: Praeger, 1970.

Waterfield, Gordon. Layard of Nineveh.London: John Murray, 1963.

A R C H A E O L O G I S T S

HenryCreswickeRawlinsonBORN

April 11, 1810Oxford, England

DIED


EDUCATION

Wrington and Ealing schools

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

An expert on ancient Assyrian andBabylonian civilizations, Mesopo-tamian archaeology generally, andcuneiform; copied the Great Rockof Behistun inscriptions and deci-phered cuneiform, two of the great-est scholarly feats of the 19th cen-tury; also had an exceptional careeras a cavalry officer, horseman, anddiplomat. Helped compile TheCuneiform Inscriptions of WesternAsia (1861-84).

H E N R Y C R E S W I C K E R A W L I N S O N 5 7

AugusteMarietta

P R E S E R V I N GA N C I E N T E G Y P TFOR THE F U T U R E

Auguste Marietta and his crew undertake excavations atSaqqara, Egypt. Mariette's digging methods were almost asbrutal as those of the looters he battled. Sometimes, ashere, he merely shored up walls and went on excavating.

uguste Marietta came to Egypt to acquiremanuscripts, but discovered a shrine full ofmummified ancient Egyptian bulls instead.He was one of the earliest professionalEgyptologists, founder of Egypt's Cairo

Museum, and a passionate advocate for the preservation ofancient Egypt at a time when the looting of sites was com-monplace along the Nile.

Mariette was born in Boulogne, France, in 1821 andeducated at the College of Boulogne, where he achievedsome distinction. However, lack of funds prevented Augustefrom completing his education. At age 18 he went to Eng-land to teach French and art at a private London college,the Shakespeare Academy House, before returning home tocomplete his education. He then settled in as a teacher at alocal college, but spent his spare time dabbling in popularjournalism. In 1842, he received an interesting assignment.An artist named Nestor L' Hote had accompanied hiero-glyph expert Jean Frangois Champollion on his triumphantexpedition to Egypt in 1828, then died on a subsequentdesert journey, leaving a mass of papers and notes behindhim. L'Hote's father asked Mariette to organize and publishthe papers. Mariette was electrified by the fascinating worldthat opened up before him. Soon he was spending everymoment of his spare time on hieroglyphs. Impulsively, heresigned his teaching position and moved to Paris, wherehe eventually found a minor job at the Louvre Museum cata-loging manuscripts. Egyptologist Charles Lenormant of themuseum was so impressed with Mariette's hard work thathe organized a project for him to collect rare Coptic manu-scripts from Christian monasteries in Egypt.

Mariette sailed for Egypt in 1850, but soon found thatthe monasteries were bitterly opposed to foreign collectors.Instead, his thoughts turned toward excavation. By late1850 he was camped in the midst of the ancient cemeteriesat Saqqara near Memphis, where he had located the headof a sphinx projecting from the sand. His wide reading inearlier years now paid off. He remembered that the Greekgeographer Strabo had referred to a temple to the bull godApis at Memphis dating to the 6th and 7th centuries BC.Strabo described an avenue of sphinxes that were constantlybeing buried by drifting sand. With almost no money andno official permit, Mariette recruited 30 workers and uncov-ered the avenue, two temples of the god Apis, and a hugecache of bronze statues of Osiris, the god of the dead, andother ancient Egyptian gods under one of the temple floors.In November 1852, he finally reached the tomb of Apis,sealed by a fine sandstone door. Huge granite sarcophagi of

A R C H A E O L O G I S T S

A

5 8

"It behooves us to preserveEgypt's monuments withcare. Five hundred yearshence Egypt should stillbe able to show to thescholars who shall visit herthe same monuments weare now describing."

—Auguste Marietta,Voyage dans k HauteEgypte (Travels inUpper Egypt, 1877)

sacrificial bulls lay inside, all looted inantiquity. He was lucky enough to findone undisturbed bull burial, completewith both the bull mummy and richjewelry and gold, which caused a sensa-tion when exhibited at the Louvre.The find brought Mariette considerablefame. He was promoted to AssistantKeeper at the Louvre on the strengthof his discovery.

Auguste Mariette was a restlessman who found great delight in archae-ology. At Saqqara, he lived in a mudhouse surrounded by women, children,pet monkeys, and his laborers. Hedeveloped a powerful ambition to saveEgypt's monuments from the epidemicof looting that besieged them. Amonghis admirers was Ferdinand de Lesseps,the French diplomat and entrepreneurresponsible for building the Suez Canal.In 1857 de Lesseps persuaded the Pashaof Egypt to send for Mariette on theoccasion of the visit of Prince Napo-leon of France to the Nile. It was onlywhen Mariette arrived that he discov-ered that he was supposed to dig forfine antiquities to be presented to theroyal visitor. Mariette did not hesitatefor a moment and started digging at

Saqqara and Luxor with excellentresults. The royal visit was canceled,so de Lesseps persuaded the Pasha toappoint Mariette to a new post asDirector of Ancient Monuments forEgypt and curator of a new museumof antiquities to be built in Cairo.

The appointment was bitterlyopposed by dealers and diplomats, whowere prospering off illegal excavations.Mariette started a vigorous excavationcampaign immediately, on the groundsthat it was better that sites be exca-vated officially than by treasure hun-ters. He commandeered the services ofentire villages when needed. At onepoint he was excavating at 37 differentlocations in Egypt in a frenzied racewith looters for fine antiquities. Mari-ette needed spectacular finds to fill hismuseum and to satisfy the ruler. Heused dynamite to blast into rock-cuttombs and cared little about recordingthe positions of artifacts or architec-tural details. His excavators clearedmore than 300 tombs near the pyra-mids of Giza and at Saqqara alone.At Edfu in Upper Egypt, he moved anentire village built on the roof of theburied temple and exposed this magnif-icent shrine to full view for the firsttime in centuries. His men cleared theburied temple of Queen Hatshepsutacross the Nile from Luxor, excavatedmuch of the great temple of the sungod Amun at Kamak, also at Luxor,and carried off boatloads of statuaryand small artifacts.

Mariette cared little about conser-vation and combated illegal digging byforbidding any unauthorized excavationand making it almost impossible toexport any antiquities from the country.He worked under difficult conditions.The Pasha cared little about archaeol-ogy and had appointed Mariette to hispost to appease the powerful de Lessepsand his wealthy backers. Marietteneeded funds for his museum, whichwas housed in an abandoned mosque.The only way he could satisfy the Pasha

AugusteMariettaBORN

February 11, 1821Boulogne, France

DIED

January 18, 1881Cairo, Egypt

EDUCATION

College of Boulogne, France

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

First professional Egyptologist inEgypt, did much to preserve ancientEgypt for posterity; discovered thetemple of the bull god Apis and theScrapium temple, Saqqara; clearedand excavated numerous templesand tombs, including the templeof Queen Hatshepsut near Luxor;founded the Cairo Museum andbuilt the core of its collections byexcavation. Wrote Voyage dans kHaute Egypte (Travels in UpperEgypt, 1877).

A U G U S T E M A R I E T T E 5 9

Years of arduous excavation and constantefforts to save Egypt's past wore AugusteMariette down and broke his health. How-even by the time of his death, his CairoMuseum was well established and manyartifacts had been saved for posterity.

was with a steady stream of fine arti-facts. But even then he had to guardagainst the Pasha casually making giftsof them to distinguished visitors. This,of course, meant that everything wassubordinated to frantic digging, whichdid incalculable damage to unique,undisturbed archaeological sites.

Early in 1859 Mariette learned thatthe gold-decorated sarcophagus ofQueen Aahotep, mother of the MiddleKingdom pharaoh Ahmose the Libera-tor, who ruled about 1540 BC, had beenfound intact at Luxor. He also learnedthat the local governor had seized thecoffin, removed the jewelry, and sentit to the Pasha as a gift. Mariettepromptly set out in a steamer with anofficial order to stop all loaded vesselson the river. Tempers flared when thetwo steamers met. In a fury, Mariettefought first with his fists and then heldthe skipper at gunpoint until the pre-cious gold and jewelry were handedover. The Pasha was so pleased withthe finds and, one suspects, at thediscomfiture of his official, that heordered a new museum built to housethe queen's burial furniture.

Mariette's long career also involvedhim in diplomacy. He accompaniedthe Pasha on an official visit to France,where the ruler received a tumultuouswelcome in Boulogne, a gesture thatearned Mariette a pension and thehonorific title of Bey. In 1867, he spenta year in Paris setting up the Egyptianexhibit at the International Exhibitionof that year. The Cairo museum wassearched for its finest treasures. QueenAahotep's jewelry was the sensation ofFrance. None other than the EmpressEugenie admired the jewels. She gra-ciously intimated to the Pasha that shewould be pleased to receive the finds asa gift. It was a great moment for Egyp-tology when the Pasha hesitated. Hetold the empress that she would have

to receive Mariette's permission. Nei-ther threats nor bribery could moveMariette, not even the displeasure ofan empress or the Pasha. The jewelryreturned safely to Egypt.

Archaeologist and part-time diplo-mat, Mariette was rarely idle. He wres-tled with a growing influx of touriststo Egypt, many of them with souvenirhunting on their minds. He employedmore than 2,800 laborers during hiscareer in a frantic race to find artifactsfor his museum before it was too late,setting up workshops at towns alongthe Nile to handle new finds, an inno-vation far ahead of his time. He wasdeeply involved in the glittering cere-monies that marked the opening of theSuez Canal, on November 17, 1869,when he had the quiet satisfaction ofescorting the Empress Eugenie toEgypt's finest archaeological sites. ThePasha even commissioned him to writethe libretto with an ancient Egyptiantheme for Verdi's opera Aida, whichopened at the Cairo Opera House tocelebrate the inauguration of the canal.

Mariette's last years were marked bytragedy. His wife and children died oneby one, leaving him little to live for. Aflood at the museum destroyed many ofhis notes and records. He became "agedrather than old like the colossi overwhich he watches," wrote a Frenchnobleman in 1872. His health failedand he died peacefully in his house byhis beloved museum in 1881. He wasburied at the door of the museum aftera state funeral that attracted tributesfrom around the world.

FURTHER READING

Fagan, Brian M. The Rape of the Nile.New York: Scribners, 1975.

Reeves, Nicholas. Ancient Egypt: TheGreat Discoveries. London: Thames andHudson, 2000.

6 0 ARCHAEOLOGISTSA

CharlesWarren

E X C A V A T O R OFB I B L I C A L J E R U S A L E M

Captain Charles Warren (1840-1927), an army engineer,became an archaeologist by accident. He tunneled underJerusalem and revealed traces of the Biblical city, becom-ing one of the founders of Biblical archaeology.

harles Warren was an archaeologist whoworked almost entirely underground. His worktook him into the honeycomb of water chan-nels and reservoirs that lay under the city ofJerusalem in his day. He suffered showers of

stones thrown down on him by outraged Islamic worshippers,but found traces of the biblical city at a time when manypeople believed in the historical truth of the Scriptures.

Warren was born in England in 1840, the son of anarmy general. At an early age, Charles decided to followhis father into the army. He attended the Royal Academyat Woolwich, at the time a major military school for boyswhere the discipline was rigorous. The young Warrenlearned persistence and determination from his years at theacademy, qualities that were to serve him well in later years.He was commissioned a lieutenant in the Royal Engineersin 1857 and spent seven years in Gibraltar, surveying forpotential defense works and constructing artillery batteries.Gibraltar, then as now, was a strategic fortress at the mouthof the Mediterranean Sea. Warren's years with the garrisonthere gave him superb practical experience in tunneling andaccurate surveying, essential qualities for anyone planningto excavate Jerusalem.

Not that Warren had any ambitions to become anarchaeologist. He was posted to Jerusalem in 1864 to surveyits topography and water supplies. Most of his work wasbelowground, where he explored a maze of cisterns andchannels that lay beneath the modern city. His men madeimportant archaeological finds during their surveys. Alongthe eastern wall, they uncovered a monumental Romanarch that once formed the entrance to biblical King Herod'spalace. The temple, rebuilt on the ruins of an earlier templeby King Herod in the 1st century BC, had been demolishedby the Romans in A.D. 70. Part of its wall survived andeventually became the Western, or Wailing Wall, one ofJudaism's most sacred sites.

Warren's archaeological discoveries astounded anddelighted his countrymen. In 1865, a public meeting in Lon-don launched the Palestine Exploration Fund, with QueenVictoria as its official patron. Its objective was to find tracesof events and people mentioned in the Scriptures. Two yearslater the fund sent Warren and another detachment of RoyalEngineers to Jerusalem with instructions to excavate underthe Haram esh Sharif, a walled compound that housed someof Islam's most sacred shrines.

The adventurous 27-year-old Warren was an ideal choicefor the job. In February 1867, he landed in the Turkish portof Jaffa, in what was then Palestine, accompanied by two

C H A R L E S W A R R E N 6 1

c

Lieutenant Charles Warren (left) poseswith Joseph Barclay of the London JewsMissionary Society (center) and his chiefenlisted man, Corporal Henry Phillips(right), in Jerusalem in August 1867.A traveler; F. A. Eaton, attracted to theHoly Land by adventure and hunting,lies in the foreground. A local guide canbe seen in the background.

noncommissioned officers. His troublesbegan at once. The Turkish customsofficials at the port confiscated hissextant, an instrument for finding one'slocation on the earth by taking read-ings of the sun and other heavenlybodies. They were convinced that itwas a dangerous weapon. After recover-ing this vital piece of equipment, War-ren set off inland. The weather wasterrible, and he and his men had totravel to Jerusalem by mule alongrough, wind-buffeted paths. He thenspent months in Jerusalem waiting foran official excavation permit from theSultan of Turkey in Constantinople.

Warren did not waste the timespent in waiting. He cultivated localofficials and paid visits to local religiousleaders and desert sheikhs, even spend-ing time among some Bedouin goatherders notorious for their violence andthievery. Warren was soon well versedin the intricacies of local politics andreligious rivalries, which was just as

well. The sultan's Muslim advisers werevery nervous about Warren's plan. Theydenied him permission to dig, for theyfelt that any attempt to prove thehistorical truth of the Bible was sub-versive. His firman (permit) allowedhim to work only outside the citywalls, useless permission because theall-important archaeological layers layunder the temple mound.

Warren was in a difficult position.In Jerusalem he was dealing with cor-rupt and suspicious officials who wereamenable to bribes. In London thePalestine Exploration Fund was press-ing him for results. Warren asked formore money for bribes. The fundrefused. So he took matters into hisown hands, placed some judiciousbribes with the money he had, andstarted to dig shafts downward, thentoward the Haram from 150 feet (46meters) outside the city walls. His mensmashed through a blocked passagewayalongside the Haram walls and so out-raged worshipers in the mosque abovethat they showered the diggers withstones. The governor promptly forbadeWarren's excavating on any officialland, or closer than 40 feet (12 meters)from the Haram.

The young officer was not stymiedfor long. He leased private lots wellaway from the Haram, sunk verticalshafts to bedrock, and tunneled towardthe shrines. He found that the 80-foot(24-meter) high walls of the Haramextended more than 100 feet (30meters) below the surface. Warrenbecame increasingly clever at bribery.On one occasion he seized his largegreen pet lizard and threw it on hotcoals. A greedy official slavered overthis fine delicacy. Licking his lips, hegave permission for work to proceed.

Warren and his corporals wereexpert tunnel diggers, but nothingprepared them for the hazardous taskthat lay ahead of them. Loose boulders


"The strain on the nerves during this work was intense,and required of the men the greatest amount of fortitudeand self-control; again and again they would entirely loseall power of restraining the involuntary movement of themuscles, so that their limbs refused to obey them."

—Charles Warren, Underground Jerusalem (1876)

and thick dust hampered progress. Onone occasion their tools were buried bya sudden cave-in. They shored up thedamage and continued. The tunnelnow headed under the city walls andeventually reached a long buried wall,inscribed with the initials of the origi-nal builder. Warren sank 27 shafts andtraced the northern and southern limitsof the old city, following the walls ofJerusalem far underground. He and hiscolleague Sergeant Birtles made metiC'ulous plans and drawings. They crawledthrough long-buried passages and downmurky shafts as they mapped the topog-raphy of the biblical Jerusalem. Theirdiscoveries included a shaft that oncetransported water to the ancient city,today known as Warren's Shaft. Onanother occasion they broke into aslippery, rock-cut passage leading to thecenter of the Temple Mount, 5 to 6feet (1.5 meters) deep and filled withraw sewage. The diggers were hamperedby constant money shortages, uncoop-erative officials, tunnel cave-ins, andthe constant threat of malaria. Warrenhimself fell ill of malaria several times,and a corporal died of the disease.

When the sultan finally prohibitedany further excavation, in 1870, War-ren returned home to write Underground Jerusalem and Tent Work inPalestine, which described his work fora popular audience and were receivedwith critical acclaim. His academicmonograph, The Survey of Western

Palestine, appeared in eight volumesin 1885 and is still useful today.

Charles Warren never returned toJerusalem. He surveyed the borders ofthe territory of Griqualand West inSouth Africa from 1876 to 1882, set-tled tribal disputes in Bechuanaland,and commanded troops in the samegeneral region. After a distinguishedmilitary career, he became Commis-sioner of Police at Scotland Yard inLondon, during the period of the Jackthe Ripper murders. After ScotlandYard, he served as an administrator inSingapore for five years. In old age hebecame a controversial figure, muchconcerned with social reform. He oncesuggested that cities should let wolvesrun loose to keep children alert, and heengaged in intricate mathematical cal-culations that attempted, and failed, toexplain the orbits of the planets. Hedied in 1927 at the age of 86.

Warren's Jerusalem discoveries pro-vided the first framework for biblicalarchaeology. A century was to passbefore anyone reinvestigated the city'sancient walls.

FURTHER READING

Kenyon, Kathleen. Digging Up Jerusalem.New York: Praeger, 1974.

Silberman, Neil A. Digging for God andCountry: Exploration, Archaeology, andthe Secret Struggle for the Holy Land. NewYork: Knopf, 1982.

CharlesWarrenBORN

February 17, 1840London, England

DIED

January 21, 1927London, England

EDUCATION

Woolwich Academy of the RoyalEngineers (commissioned lieu-tenant, 1857)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

First person to investigate the holycity of Jerusalem; made the first mapof the walls of ancient Jerusalemand found important evidence ofthe Roman city. Wrote UndergroundJerusalem (1876); The Survey ofWestern Palestine (1885).

C H A R L E S W A R R E N 6 3

HeinrichSchliemann

D I S C O V E R E R OF TROY

einrich Schliemann rose from rags toriches, then indulged his fascination withthe historical truth of the Iliad and its sto-ries of the Trojan War. His obsession ledhim to excavate the ancient city of Troy

and to make archaeological discoveries so spectacular thatan international audience followed his work.

Born in 1822, the son of a Protestant minister in ruralnorth Germany, Schliemann was strongly influenced byhis father's interest in the classics, especially in the Greekwriter Homer's Iliad, which told the story of the 10-year warbetween the Greeks under King Agamemnon and the cityof Troy. The war ended in a Greek victory and Troy wastotally destroyed. In later years Heinrich Schliemannembroidered his early life with elaborate fictions, but his

Heinrich Schliemann, dressed in Turkish costume, around 1858.Like other pioneer excavators and travelers in Greece andTurkey, Schliemann wore Turkish dress to blend in, and becauseit appealed to his romantic nature.


H

interest in Homer and Troy seems tohave begun in boyhood.

Schliemann's family was so poorthat his education finished at age 14,when he was apprenticed to a grocer.A chest infection threw him out ofwork in 1841, so he moved to Hamburgwith the intention of emigrating toVenezuela. His ship was wrecked offHolland, but he survived to obtain ajob as a shop clerk in Amsterdam. Withthe single-minded intensity that markedthe rest of his life, Schliemann set outto educate himself. He learned to writeproperly, then mastered English andFrench in a year, helped by his excep-tional memory. He quickly acquiredfour more European languages, display-ing such a remarkable aptitude for for-eign tongues that he got a job withthe Schroeder brothers, Amsterdammerchants with major interests in theRussian indigo (dye) trade.

Schliemann hired a tutor to teachhim Russian, which he learned soquickly and well that the Schroederssent him to St. Petersburg as their localagent in 1846. He was so successfulthat he set up in business as an indigomerchant on his own, soon acquiringconsiderable wealth thanks to his apti-tude for wheeling and dealing in manylanguages. In 1850 the ever-restlessSchliemann set off for California. Heset up a banking agency in Sacramentoand made a fortune during the GoldRush. Two years later he returned toSt. Petersburg, married, and had threechildren, all the while making anotherfortune supplying war materials to theRussian army during the Crimean War.While making money, he never losthis interest in Homer. He learned clas-sical and modern Greek. In 1863, atage 43, he abruptly retired from busi-ness to devote himself to Homer and asearch for the archaeological site ofHomeric Troy.

Schliemann took his time. Hewent on an extensive world tour, thenstudied archaeology in Paris before

visiting Greece for the first time in1868. At the time, most scholarsthought that Homer's Troy was a myth-ical city. Schliemann was convincedthe Iliad was the historical truth, sohe set out to the plains at the mouthof the Dardanelles in northwesternTurkey, where Troy was said to lie. Hecame to a hill named Hissarlik 3 miles(4.8 kilometers) from the coast, wherehe met the American vice-consulFrank Calvert, who owned half a largecity mound on the hill. Calvert haddug into the mound and declared it wasTroy, but it was Schliemann who wouldtake the credit for identifying theHomeric metropolis.

In 1871, Schliemann married hissecond wife, Sophia Engastromenos, a17-year-old Greek girl, in what maybeen a marriage of convenience butevolved into an enduring relationship.In October of that year, the Schlie-manns set 80 workers trenching intothe Hissarlik mound. Six weeks later, a33-foot (10-meter) trench revealedstone walls of a long-buried city. Thefollowing spring, between 100 and 150men set to work under the supervisionof engineers who had worked on thedigging of Egypt's Suez Canal. Schlie-mann reached bedrock at 45 feet (14meters), digging through layer afterlayer of human occupation with fren-zied haste. He claimed the third cityfrom the bottom was Homer's Troy,largely because the strata showed signsof burning.

At this stage, no one could callSchliemann an archaeologist. Hismethods were drastic and brutallydirect. In mid-1873, the Schliemannsmade their most controversial discov-ery: a collection of magnificent goldartifacts and ornaments in the depositsof the third city. According to theSchliemanns, they gave the workersthe day off while they secretly gatheredup the glittering finds of the "treasure"in Sophia's shawl. Scholars still argueover the Schliemann treasure: Was it a

HeinrichSchliemannBORNJanuary 6, 1822Neu Buckow, Germany

DIED

December 25, 1890Naples, Italy

EDUCATION

Self-educated

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Excavated and identified HomericTroy, although not the first to do so;discovered the Shaft Graves atMycenae, now known to be burialsof Mycenaean Bronze Age chief-tains; interested an enormous publicaudience in archaeology for the firsttime. Wrote Ilios (1873); Troy andIts Remains (1875); Mycenae (1878).

H E I N R I C H S C H L I E M A N N 6 5

"I struck upon a large copperarticle of the most remarkabkform, which attracted myattention all the mare as 1thought 1 saw gold behind it."

—Heinrich Schliemann,Hios(1873)

hoard of gold artifacts buried in a timeof peril long ago, or did the Schlie-manns gather together isolated goldobjects from many levels and "package"them to create a truly sensational find?Modern scholars are still doubtfulabout the treasure claim.

Heinrich Schliemann was a bril-liant self-publicist. He wrote and lec-tured about his excavations so convinc-ingly that no one questioned the facts.There is reason to believe that he evenfabricated details of his early life. Con-troversy has dogged his finds since the1870s. His golden treasure ended up inthe Berlin Museum and vanished dur-ing World War II, only to reappear inRussia at the end of the Cold War,years after it was assumed to have beendestroyed in an air raid.

Schliemann now turned his restlessattention to another Homeric site—King Agamemnon's citadel at Mycenaein southern Greece. The excavationsbegan with three teams of 63 men dig-ging trenches around the entrance, theLion Gate, and in an open area justinside the entrance. A circle of tomb-stones bearing engravings of charioteerscame to light, then five graves contain-ing 15 skeletons literally smothered ingold. Several of the skeletons wore golddeath masks with clipped beards andmustaches. Fine headdresses, seals, andpottery lay with the burials. Schliemann

was in his element, claiming intelegrams to the world's newspapersthat he had found the tomb ofAgamemnon himself. Two ruling mon-archs and the Prime Minister of Britainwere kept informed of the excavations.Today, we know that Schliemann dis-covered the glories of the Mycenaeancivilization of Bronze Age Greece,which flourished in the late secondmillennium BC.

In 1878 Schliemann returnedto Hissarlik. This time he took well-qualified archaeologists with him. Ger-man Wilhelm Dorpfeld was trained inthe newest methods and worked withSchliemann at Hissarlik from 1888 to1890. He was a highly trained observer,an expert on stratified city sites andsmall artifacts, who helped Schliemannidentify the sixth, not the third, city asthe Homeric settlement.

By this time, Heinrich Schliemannhad become a respected archaeologist.But he remains today somewhat ofan enigma, on the one hand a near-megalomaniac and ruthless myth maker,and on the other, by all accounts, akindly and thoughtful man. Schliemannwas planning a new large-scale excava-tion on the sixth city at Hissarlik whenhe died suddenly of a ear infection inNaples on Christmas Day, 1890. Withhis passing, the heroic age of archaeo-logical discovery ended, as a new gen-eration of trained archaeologists beganwork in Mediterranean lands.

FURTHER READING

Poole, L., and G. Poole. One Passion:Two Lives: The Schliemanns of Troy. NewYork: Random House, 1966.

Taylour, Lord William. The Mycenaeans.London: Thames and Hudson, 1990.

Traill, David A. Schliemann of Troy:Treasure and Deceit. New York: St.Martin's, 1995.



ernardino Drovetti (1776-1852) achievednotoriety as French Consul General in Egyptfrom 1820 to 1829, when he aggressively col-lected ancient Egyptian antiquities.Unscrupulous and not afraid to use force,

Drovetti accumulated huge collections of mummies, papyri,and statuaries, which he sold to European monarchs andmuseums. His greatest find was the so-called Turin Canon ofKings, one of the few papyrj that records a list of ancientEgyptian kings. Drovetti's collections ended up in Berlin andTurin museums and the Louvre, but his methods were brutaland he did much damage to his finds. He was Giovanni Bel-zoni's major rival.

Jean Francois Champollion (1790-1832) gained scien-tific immortality for his decipherment of Egyptian hiero-glyphs in 1822. A brilliant linguist, Champollion worked foryears on the problem, using the signs for royalty and thetrilingual Rosetta Stone, found in northern Egypt by one ofNapoleon's officers in 1799. Years passed before his decipher-ment was fully accepted. He led a successful expedition toEgypt in 1828 and 1829, when he and his companions wereable to read the temple inscriptions for the first time. Cham-pollion was a meticulous observer with a broad interest inEgyptology. He died at an early age of a stroke.

Frederick Catherwood (1799-1854) was an English-man who studied to be an architect and instead became anacclaimed artist. He traveled widely in Egypt and the HolyLand, but achieved international fame for his drawings andpaintings of Maya sites and hieroglyphs executed when trav-eling in Central America with John Lloyd Stephens in theearly 1840s. Some of his drawings rival photographs in theiraccurate portrayals of Maya inscriptions.

John Gardner Wilkinson (1797-1875) achieved fameas the author of Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyp-tians (1835), the first popular book on ancient Egyptian civi-lization based on the decipherment of temple and tombinscriptions and papyri. He was one of the most importantEgyptologists of the 19th century. Wilkinson lived in Egyptfrom 1821 to 1833, spending most of his time copyinginscriptions. He made several other survey trips to the Nileand completed the first systematic plan of ancient Thebes.His research on the chronology of Egyptian kings includedan account of the Turin Canon.

Samuel Haven (1806—81) was a lawyer who becameSecretary of the American Antiquarian Society in 1838, apost he held for the rest of his life. Haven published one ofthe classic works of American archaeology in 1856, Archae-ology of the United States, which surveyed what was known


B

Amelia Edwards, a successful novelist, wasone of the founders of the Egypt Explo-ration Society. Her visit to the Nile in1873 alerted her to the destruction ofancient Egypt on every side. She spent therest of her life fighting for Egypt's past andto protect those few temples showing "nosign of ruin or age."

about the first human settlement of theAmericas. Haven dismissed much ofthe writing about the mound buildersof North America as pure speculation.He believed the mysterious earthworkswere constructed by Native Americans,an unusual conclusion at a time whenmost people believed foreign builderswere responsible.

Karl Richard Lepsius (1810-84)was one of the most distinguishedEgyptologists of the 19th century. Heled the Prussian expedition to Egyptand Nubia in 1842 through 1845, themost elaborate such venture of theday. Lepsius acquired a huge collectionof Egyptian antiquities and completedimportant surveys of major sites atthe same time. He was also one ofthe scholars instrumental in the accep-tance of Champollion's deciphermentof hieroglyphs.

Ernst Curtius (1814-96), profes-sor of classical philology and archaeol-ogy at Gottinger University acquiredan international reputation for hisexcavations at Olympia from 1875 to1881, the ancient site of the OlympicGames in Greece. The excavationswere conducted scientifically, with anarchitect present. Curtius even builta site museum and paid careful atten-tion to conservation of the ruins. Hisresearches were a model for later classi-cal excavations elsewhere in Greece.

Paul Emile Botta (1822-70) wasappointed French vice-consul in thetown of Mosul on the Tigris River inwhat is modern-day Iraq, in 1842. Heexcavated in the mounds of biblicalNineveh across the river, makingfew finds. But excavations at nearbyKhorsabad between 1843 and 1845yielded magnificent reliefs and thepalace of an Assyrian monarch. The

discovery caused a sensation, withBotta claiming he had found ancientNineveh. In fact, he had unearthed thepalace of the Assyrian monarch Sar-gon, built in about 710 BC. With AustenHenry Layard, Botta was one of thediscoverers of Assyrian civilization.

Ephraim Squier (1821-88) beganhis career as a journalist. In the mid-18408 he collaborated with physicianEdwin Davis on an archaeological sur-vey of the ancient mounds and earth-works of the Midwest. Their AncientMonuments of the Mississippi Valley,published by the Smithsonian Institu-tion in 1847, was the first systematicdescription of mound-builder sites.Many of the earthworks described bySquier and Davis have now vanished.Squier served as U.S. Commissionerto Peru from 1863 to 1865. He was oneof the first outsiders to report on Incaarchitecture and archaeological sites.

Cyrus Thomas (1825-1910) wasa man of diverse skills who worked fora while as a botanist before headingthe Smithsonian Institution's mound-builder excavations from 1881 to 1910.The project found Thomas excavatingand surveying Native American earth-works all over the central and easternUnited States. His Report on the MoundExplorations o/the Bureau of Ethnology,published in 1894, proved conclusivelythat the mounds were built by ancientNative Americans.

Hormuzd Rassam (1826-1910)was born in Mosul, in present-daynorthern Iraq, to a Christian family. Hebecame Austen Henry Layard's assis-tant at the Assyrian city of Nimrud in1845. After Layard's departure, Rassamworked independently at Nineveh,where he found magnificent wall reliefsof a royal lion hunt. He also excavated


at Assur, the early capital of the Assyri-ans on the Tigris River. After a periodas an interpreter in Aden and a missionto Ethiopia, he again excavated at Nin-eveh and also in southern Iraq, wherehe found many cuneiform tablets.

Amelia Edwards (1831-92) wasan English novelist who visited Egyptand Syria in 1873 to 1877. Thereaftershe published A Thousand Miles up theNik (1877), an account not only ofEgyptian sites but of the looting anddestruction under way at many sites.Edwards devoted the rest of her life tolecturing and writing about Egypt. Shewas one of the founders of the EgyptExploration Society, in 1882. AmeliaEdwards left money in her will to foundthe first Professorship of Egyptology atthe University of London. FlindersPetrie (see Part 3) held the post formore than 40 years.

Ernest de Sarzec (1836-1901)became French consul in Basra on thePersian Gulf in 1877. He learned fromlocal antiquities dealers that large num-bers of clay tablets were to be foundin the dusty mounds of Telloh in thedelta of the gulf. He dug large trenchesinto the mounds in 1877 and 1878,unearthing not only cuneiform tabletsbut statues of a ruler named Gudea,king of the city of Lagash. Sarzec dis-covered the Sumerian civilization, theearliest of all Mesopotamian civiliza-tions. He continued to excavate atTelloh almost annually until 1900.

William H. Holmes (1846-1933)was an archaeologist and artist whobased his studies of stone tools andprehistoric pottery on sound scientificprinciples, ushering in the work of laterNorth American archaeologists. Hewas influential in showing that no Pale-olithic (Old Stone Age) peoples settled

in North America and that NativeAmerican settlement was relativelylate, dating to about 4,000 years ago.

Hiram Bingham (1875-1956) wasa historian who rediscovered the spec-tacular Inca city of Macchu Picchuhigh in the Andes, in July 1911. Hewas convinced that he had found thefamed "last city of the Incas," the leg-endary Vilcabamba. A later trek intothe jungle produced another Inca set-tlement, Espiritu Pampa. Binghamwent on to become a U.S. senator anddied in 1956 believing he had foundthe last city. Researches in the 1960sproved him wrong: Espiritu Pampa wasthe last Inca stronghold.

Ernest de Sarzec's excavations at Tellohin southern Iraq revealed the Sumeriancivilization.This photograph, taken byde Sarzec himself, shows the mudbrickfoundations of a Sumerian palace.


General Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers was a master excavator This ditch at Worbarrow, England, shows his method of digging in shal-low "spits," or artificial layers, which allowed him to record the position of every find, however insignificant.


The Birthof ScientificArchaeology

Scientific archaeology was born of the adventure and treasure huntingof 19th-century excavation. By the time novelist Amelia Edwardssailed up the Nile in 1873, new archaeological methods were slowlycoming into use in the work of British and German archaeologists.

Prussian monarchs of Germany had long supported archaeology in the NearEast, notably Egyptologist Richard Lepsius's expedition to the Nile in 1842 to1845, which emphasized recording over artifact collection. Classical archaeolo-gist Alexander Conze used much more rigorous excavations on the island ofSamothrace in the Aegean in 1873 to 1875, with an architect on-site at alltimes. His student Ernst Curtius used the same scientific approach during hisfive years at Olympia between 1875 and 1880. His excavations emphasizedstratigraphic (earth-layer) observations, the study of small objects, architecture,and conservation, and even included the building of a site museum. The Ger-man archaeologists ushered in an era of more scientific excavation in the easternMediterranean and classical lands.

Conze arid Curtius were fathers of scientific excavation in the Mediter-ranean region. Simultaneously, English general Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Riversadvocated highly scientific excavation in Britain at a time when most digs werelittle more than hurried searches for exciting finds. Pitt-Rivers was an advocateof total excavation of an entire site down to bedrock, of the recording of theposition in time and space of every find, however insignificant, and of prompt,complete publication of information about every dig. Few archaeologists fol-lowed his example until another Englishman, Mortimer Wheeler, refined hisexcavation methods in the 1920s and revolutionized archaeological fieldwork inthe process.

The Germans and Pitt-Rivers ushered in three quarters of a century ofincreasingly scientific archaeology, reflected not only in better excavation meth-ods, but in a battery of new techniques, often from such disciplines as botanyand biology. Fieldworkers moved away from a total fascination with large,attention-getting finds to more fine-grained approaches that concentrated asmuch on small, humble objects like pot fragments (potsherds) as they did onpalaces and royal burials.

AUGUSTUS LANEFOX PITT-RIVERS

WILLIAM MATTHEWFLINDERS PETRIE

GERTRUDE BELL

HENRI BREUIL

HOWARD CARTER

ARTHUR JOHN EVANS

HARRIET BOYD HAWES

ALFRED VINCENT KIDDER

OSCAR MONTELIUS

SYLVANUS GRISWOLDMORLEY

AUREL STEIN

LEONARD WOOLLEY

VERE GORDON CHILDE

T H E B I R T H O F S C I E N T I F I C A R C H A E O L O G Y 7 1

3

The British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie was a pioneer in pottery analysis andaccurate surveying. He began his career when he made the first accurate survey ofthe pyramids of Giza, then moved on to large-scale excavations on pyramids, burials,and town sites throughout Egypt. Petrie insisted on the importance of the smallobject. He was the first to identify imported clay vessels from Crete and Greece inEgyptian sites, which allowed him to cross-date sites and cultures on the other side ofthe Mediterranean. When he excavated large cemeteries dating to before the time ofthe pharaohs, he developed a method of placing each grave in chronological order,using style changes in clay jars for the purpose.

Petrie's aims and concerns were admirable, but his methods often were far frommodern standards, as were those of Arthur Evans, who excavated the Palace of Knos-sos on northern Crete in 1900. Evans had no formal training in excavation. LikePetrie, he was self-taught and used crude methods compared with those of his mod-ern successors. He revealed the long-forgotten Minoan civilization by excavatingroom after room of the Palace of Minos, using dozens of workers to do so. Inevitably,much valuable information was lost, but one can argue that today's detailed knowl-edge of the Minoans results in large part from Evans's pioneering work.

Until 1900, archaeology was almost exclusively a male pursuit, a close-knit clubof well-educated gentlemen, all of whom knew one another. Excavation was notconsidered suitable for ladies, who were, however, permitted to work on artifacts andart in the laboratory. Desert traveler Gertrude Bell was one of the first to break themale barrier. Self-taught and an expert traveler in Arab lands, Bell never excavatedon her own account, but carried out pioneer archaeological surveys at a variety ofsites in desert environments. After World War I she founded the Iraq Museum anddevised antiquities laws to protect the country's cultural heritage from wholesaleexport and destruction. Gertrude Bell was a strong personality who had no patiencefor those with slow minds or set ways. Even powerful government servants wereafraid to stand in her way. At the same time, she developed close ties with desertchieftains, who trusted her completely—a vital political asset in early Iraq.

Other women started work at about the same time. Notable among them wasthe American Harriet Hawes, who went out to work on mainland Greece with aclassical archaeology scholarship, but was not allowed by her supervisors to go intothe field. Arthur Evans encouraged her to excavate in Crete, where she found theMinoan town at Gournia. Like Bell, Hawes got on very well with her workers. Buther researches were almost forgotten until the 1990s, when her daughter wroteher biography.

Flinders Petrie also encouraged women in the field, despite the notoriouslytough conditions in his excavation camps. Gertrude Caton-Thompson was one of hislater students (see Part 4). She was remarkable for her interest in stone artifacts andStone Age sites rather than ancient Egyptian civilization. Petrie left her alone, for hebelieved that training was best gained from practical experience on one's own. Theexperiment was a success. Caton-Thompson went on to find some of the earliestfarming settlements in the world west of the Nile, and unraveled the mysteries ofruins at Great Zimbabwe in southern Africa, in 1929. She became one of the mostrespected Stone Age archaeologists of her time.

The early years of the 20th century were still a time of spectacular discoveries.The year 1922 saw the finding of pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb by Howard Carterand his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon. Sir Leonard Woolley excavated the biblical cityof Ur in southern Iraq with its dramatic royal cemeteries. Woolley was one of thelast excavators to work with small armies of laborers. It is said that he employed a


Euphrates River boatman to sing rowing songs to keep the work pace steady when-ever his laborers were shifting large amounts of earth.

American archaeology also made remarkable advances during the early 20thcentury. Alfred Kidder excavated Pecos Pueblo in the North American southwest,and revolutionized the study of ancient Native Americans by working from the pre-sent back into the remote past. At the same time, the astronomer A. E. Douglassinvented tree-ring dating, a method of determining the age of ancient pueblo beamsby using the concentric tree-rings in them, which were compared with the rings intrees still growing in the same area. The result was an accurate time scale for theancestral pueblo cultures of the Southwest and dates for Pueblo Bonito, the CliffPalace at Mesa Verde, and other major pueblo sites.

In the eastern United States, the haphazard excavations of Cyrus Thomas andothers gave way to more precise fieldwork, which culminated in a series of large-scaleriver valley archaeological surveys in the 1930s, carried out in advance of dam con-struction. Fieldworkers like Gordon Willey and James Ford developed sequences ofancient Native American cultures for enormous areas of eastern and midwesternNorth America, where little had been known before.

Knowledge of the Maya civilization expanded dramatically, in large part becauseof the work of Alfred Maudslay and Sylvanus Morley. Of the two, Maudslay wasprobably the more adept and accurate in his recording, but both of them copied andrecorded a remarkable body of Maya inscriptions, which helped later generations ofscholars decipher the intricate Maya script.

Archaeological research was begun in many far-flung parts of the world in thefirst half of the 20th century, notably in China and southern Africa, as well as Peruand other parts of South America. Sir Aurel Stein was one of the few scholars andtravelers who explored the hitherto unknown archaeology of Central Asia. He alsoinvestigated parts of the ancient Silk Road that linked China with the West. Mucharchaeology was still concentrated on cultures in the early recorded history of theclassical and Mediterranean lands, Europe, and North America. Only a handful ofscholars took a broader view of the prehistoric world. One of them was the Danishscholar Oscar Montelius, who developed some of the first classifications of laterEuropean prehistoric societies and linked them to the Mediterranean world. Anotherwas French prehistorian Henri Breuil, the world's first expert on prehistoric art and amaster classifier of stone tools.

Oscar Montelius died in 1921 just as a young archaeologist named Vere GordonChilde began his lifelong study of the European past. Childe was a gifted linguist anda remarkable summarizer of archaeological data, whose encyclopedic knowledge ofartifacts and archaeological sites enabled him to write about ancient times on agrand scale. In a series of widely read books, Childe wrote the prehistory of Europe inflowing narratives. He used artifacts and human cultures instead of kings and states-men as the characters. For example, the first farmers who spread into Europe fromthe southeast along the Danube River became the Danubians, an agricultural societyfound from the Balkans to the Netherlands. He painted a picture of a continent thatreceived ideas from the Near East, including agriculture and urban civilization.These great revolutions in human experience were defining points in the past thathelped shape Europe long before Julius Caesar conquered Gaul in 55 BC.

Gordon Childe's ideas helped move archaeology from a narrow focus on artifactsand time scales to a much broader perspective, one that looked at the prehistoricpast on a truly global canvas. New generations of archaeologists expanded on andrefined his pioneering ideas after World War II.

T H E B I R T H O F S C I E N T I F I C A R C H A E O L O G Y 7 3

AugustusLane FoxPitt-Rivers

F O U N D E R O F M O D E R NA R C H A E O L O G I C A LE X C A V A T I O N

eneral Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers,a world authority on ancient firearms, pio-neered scientific archaeological excavationat a time when most digs were little morethan hurried treasure hunts. He was a harsh

disciplinarian who applied to his excavations a kind of mili-tary rigor that was unique in the 19th century.

Born Augustus Henry Lane Fox on 1827, he was thesecond son of an aristocratic family of modest circumstances.His noble birth assured him a position in a military school atage 13, but not much is known of his schooling or early aspi-rations. He was commissioned into a highly regarded infantryregiment, the Grenadier Guards, in 1845. The appointmentrequired considerable private money to maintain the lifestyleconsidered fitting for an officer and gentleman, and that wasassured by the death of his elder brother in 1852. The youngofficer developed a passion for guns and muskets. In 1854he wrote a handbook on firearms for the British army titledInstruction of Musketry, which remained a standard work for

Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers was a revolutionary archaeologist.Unlike many of his contemporaries who focused on retrievingbeautiful treasures, Pitt-Rivers stressed the importance of totalexcavation, accurate recording of layers and features, and recov-ering all objects no matter how small.


G

many years. His professional specialtyalso became a hobby, for he starteda collection of antique firearms thatformed the basis for his lifetime interestin the evolution of weapons of all kinds.

The publication of Charles Dar-win's Origin of Species in 1859 was aturning point in Fox's intellectual life.He claimed in later life that he had"known" natural selection intuitivelybefore Origin appeared, but this seemsunlikely. He was soon arguing that thesame rules of evolution and naturalselection applied to human-made arti-facts such as weapons, a controversialviewpoint for a military man. In 1862,now Lieutenant Colonel Lane Fox wasappointed Assistant QuartermasterGeneral in Cork, Ireland, a post thatinvolved considerable travel and gavethe impetus for his first excursionsinto archaeology. Many of his dutiesinvolved surveying the surroundingcountryside, where he observed thatmany ancient raths (earthen enclo-sures) marked on previous maps hadvanished. He started documenting van-ished sites threatened by imminentdestruction and collected artifacts suchas bronze brooches, clay vessels, anddaggers during his surveys.

Lane Fox's first foray into excava-tion came when he was transferredback to London. He investigated a con-struction site close to London's Romanwall, where the workers had found cart-loads of ancient bones. He visited thesite daily for two months and docu-mented the layers of gravel and themarshy soil called peat at the site. Thiswas his first experience at observingcomplex occupation layers, a methodthat was to become a vital part of hislater excavations. He deplored theenormous numbers of fossil bones thatwere carted away. He wrote: "The ves-tiges are in a daily process of destruc-tion at our own doors who are ignorantof their meaning and of the importancethat attaches to them." In 1867 hewent on half pay from the army and

devoted himself full time to archaeol-ogy and ancient weapons. He exca-vated the Cissbury Hill Iron Age fortin Sussex in southeastern England thatyear. He acquired numerous flint arrow-heads for his collections, but otherwisefound the dig unsatisfying. At the timehe had little experience of the complexlayering of such sites, which meant thathe confused different building stagesand occupation levels.

After several years of minor exca-vations, where he improved his excava-tion skills, Fox returned in 1875 toCissbury, where he approached the siteand neighboring locations with meticu-lous care. He now dug "sections,"trenches cut at right angles acrossearthworks down to solid chalk, andrecorded the exact position of smallartifacts and stratified layers. To Fox,archaeology had become not a treasurehunt but a search for historical infor-mation, using the layers of a site toreconstruct its history. During threeyears of excavations, he investigatedStone Age flint mines, more hill forts,and even part of a Norman castle, lay-ing the foundations for his later, muchlarger scale work.

A series of family deaths made Foxthe sole and unexpected heir of hisuncle's immense fortune and the exten-sive Cranborne Chase estates in south-ern England. He inherited the estate in1880, took the family name Pitt-Rivers,and became master of 27,700 acres(11,220 hectares) with an income of£27,000 a year, several million dollarsin today's money. Pitt-Rivers retiredfrom the army and devoted the rest ofhis life to digging sites on his extensiveproperties. He revolutionized archaeo-logical excavation in the process. In1882 the British government appointedhim Inspector of Ancient Monuments,a post that kept him in touch with theleading archaeologists of the day.

The huge estate he had inheritedwas a rural landscape, a great tract ofmedieval hunting country that had

AugustusLane FoxPitt-RiversBORNApril 14, 1827London, England

DIED

May 4, 1900Salisbury, Wiltshire, England

EDUCATION

Private

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Well-known collector of firearms,student of cultural evolution,archaeologist; surveyed archaeologi-cal sites in Ireland, excavated Ciss-bury Hill fort in southern England;after 1880, made innovative excava-tions at Cranborne Chase that revo-lutionized archaeological methods.Wrote Instruction of Musketry(1854); Excavations inChase (1887-98).

A U G U S T U S L A N E F O X P I T T - R I V E R S 7 5

Cranborne

never been plowed. Pitt-Rivers realizedthat he had a unique chance to investi-gate ancient burial mounds, earthworks,and Roman villas on his property. Hestarted with Bronze Age barrows (burialmounds), then moved on to Winkle-bury Camp, an Iron Age fort. There hecross-sectioned ramparts just as he haddone at Cissbury in 1875.

In 1884 he turned from earthworksto a Roman military camp at WoodcuttsCommon, several acres of low banks,humps, and hollows. Pitt-Rivers hadhis workmen clear off the top soil, thendig out the dark irregularities in thewhite chalk subsoil and trace the out-lines of ditches, hearths, pits, and post-holes. This was revolutionary archaeol-ogy in the 1880s. In 1893, he turned

his attention to Wor Barrow, a StoneAge earthwork used for communalburials. His predecessors had simplytrenched into burial mounds andremoved the human remains and gravefurniture. Pitt-Rivers excavated theentire mound, including 16 skeletons,leaving a row of earthen pillars downthe center, which recorded the layer-ing. At one end of the mound he founda rectangular outline of trenches in thechalk, where the uprights of a largebuilding protected six bodies. In a finalexercise in archaeological science, andto gain knowledge to better interprethis excavations, he left the ditchesthat surrounded the mound open forfour years, then excavated what hadcollected in them to see how chalk


The photograph shows the early stagesof the Worbarrow ditch excavationsat Cranborne Chase in southern England.The ditches yielded many earthworkartifacts. Pitt-Rivers himself standson the mound with his cousin, LadyMagheramorne.

"Tedious as it may appear to some, to dwell on the discoveryof odds and ends that have, no doubt, been thrown away bytheir owners as rubbish yet it is by the study of such trivialdetails that archaeology is mainly dependent for determiningthe date of earthworks."

—Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, Excavations inCranbarne Chase (1892)

ditches broke down and filled withsediment after abandonment.

A tall, moody man with a quicktemper, Pitt-Rivers was gifted withsuperb organizational skills. He com-piled four privately printed volumes,Excavations in Cranborne Chase, heavilyillustrated books describing every detailof his excavations. He ran his projectson disciplined, military lines, workingwith small teams of trained workers,and site supervisors who had two assis-tants, one a draftsman, the other amodel maker. From the very beginning,Pitt-Rivers recorded the position ofevery find, including ani-mal bones and seeds, however small.Throughout his excavations, he thoughtof his sites in three dimensions, a legacyfrom his surveying days, and a corner-stone of modern excavation methods.Each site was excavated completelydown to bedrock, each layer recorded,human disturbances of the soil noted.Pitt-Rivers pioneered the use of photog-raphy to record his sites and insistedon prompt publication of the results.Unlike his contemporaries, he wasinterested in how earthworks wereformed and weathered by the elements.

Pitt-Rivers had no patience forarchaeologists who just searchedfor objects. He considered science

"organized common sense," a principlehe followed throughout his excava-tions. It was not until the 1920s thatother archaeologists like MortimerWheeler followed his example andrefined his methods. His contempo-raries considered him eccentric, buthe was firm in his own ways, whichincluded providing free Sunday con-certs for visitors to the museum hous-ing his collections. There, his collec-tions of firearms, tribal artifacts, andarchaeological finds were displayed inevolutionary sequences, from the sim-ple to the more complex. Pitt-Riversbelieved that archaeology should bepart of everyone's education, so thatthe public could learn the linksbetween past and present.

General Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers was years ahead of his time, buthis methods are the cornerstone of allmodern archaeological excavation.

FURTHER READING

Bowden, Mark. The Life and ArchaeologicalWork of Lieutenant-General Augustus LaneFox Pitt-Rivers. New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1991.

Thompson, M. W. General Pitt-Rivers.Bradford-on-Avon, England: Moonraker,

1977.

A U G U S T U S L A N E F O X P I T T - R I V E R S 7 7

WilliamMatthewFlindersPetrie

T O M B S , TOWNS,A N D C E M E T E R I E SBY THE NILE

William Matthew Flinders Petrie wasarguably the greatest Egyptologistof the 19th century. His excavationmethods revolutionized the archaeol-ogy of ancient Egypt. He also devel-

oped the first method for dating farming cultures that flour-ished along the Nile River before the pharaohs, and carriedout important excavations in Palestine. Petrie was morethan slightly eccentric and lived in squalor in his excavationcamps while carrying out inspiring excavations. One of hisyoung students, Leonard Woolley, who went on to dig at theHittite city of Carchemish and the biblical city of Ur, wrotein his memoirs of a camp where "tinned kidneys mingle withmummy corpses and amulets in the soup." But Petrie revolu-tionized the study of Egyptology.

Flinders Petrie was bom in Charlton, England, in 1853.His father was a civil engineer and surveyor, his mother apassionate collector of coins and minerals. His formal educa-tion was largely private and sketchy at best, as his parentswere casual people. But the young Petrie read widely andpicked up an excellent practical knowledge of geometry andsurveying from his father. By age 13 he was already readingbooks on ancient Egypt and the pyramids. As a teenager hespent hours browsing among coins and books in the BritishMuseum. He also walked for miles over the English country-side making maps of ancient earthworks. "I used to spendfive shillings and sixpence a week on food, and beds costabout double that," he wrote in his autobiography. "I learnedthe land and the people all over the south of England, usu-ally sleeping in a cottage."

In 1872 he and his father surveyed the stone circles atStonehenge, producing a plan that was not improved onfor years. Eight years later, at the age of 27, Flinders Petriesailed for Egypt with his surveying instruments and almostno money. He set up camp in an abandoned ancient Egypt-ian tomb near the pyramids of Giza, then spent many weekssetting up accurate survey points and studying the construc-tion of these stupendous monuments. Petrie also had ampletime to observe the rough excavation methods used byAuguste Mariette and others. He wrote in disgust years laterin his Pyramids and Tombs of Egypt: "It is sickening to seethe rate at which everything is being destroyed, and thelittle regard paid to preservation."

Petrie's meticulous survey soon attracted the attentionof both archaeologists and cranks. General Augustus LaneFox Pitt-Rivers visited his camp and thoroughly approvedof his approach, which mirrored the general's own workin England. In the intervals of surveying, Petrie picked


w

up potsherds and other small objectsignored by most excavators and realizedthey held valuable historical clues. As aresult, he paid careful attention to eventhe smallest finds throughout his longcareer. He kept unwanted visitors awayby working in the pyramids' hot cham-bers in his underwear.

The Pyramid Survey 1880-82,Petrie's first book, enhanced his reputa-tion considerably within the narrowcommunity of Egyptologists, despite hislack of a formal education. Inevitably,he turned from survey work to actualdigging. Between 1883 and 1887,Petrie excavated for the London-basedEgypt Exploration Fund, which proveda somewhat unsatisfactory relationshipbecause of funding shortages and quar-rels with his superiors. Nevertheless,he made important discoveries at sitesin the Nile Delta such as the Greek-Egyptian cities of Tanis and Naukratis,once important trading centers. Herehe refined his own excavation meth-ods, concentrating not on spectacularfinds but on small artifacts such as potfragments and beads.

Rough and ready by today's stan-dards, Petrie's digging, based on teamsof diggers and earth carriers, was a vastimprovement on earlier techniques.In his first seasons he recovered hugequantities of pottery and papyri, whichwere exhibited in London. Most of itcame from a system of paying his manyworkers tips for each find, which grewto the point that he effectively boughtthe contents of the site. In time, hebegan to appreciate the importance ofdistinctive potsherds and other artifactsas a way of dating important structures.When each digging season ended,Petrie set to work at once to write uphis excavation, setting an example ofprompt publication that even today'sarchaeologists do not achieve.

In 1887 Petrie severed his connec-tions with the Egypt Exploration Fundand set up as a freelance excavator,financing his excavations by selling

artifacts to museums. He now followeda life routine that varied little for therest of his career. He would spend thewinters in Egypt excavating, the sum-mers lecturing, traveling, and writing.Year after year, he excavated pyramidsand tombs, towns, and cemeteries.Several generations of archaeologistslearned excavation under him, ademanding experience. They receivedlittle formal instruction, were sent outto work without close supervision formany hours in the hot sun, and spenthours each evening sorting and classify-ing pot fragments. There were fewcomforts. Petrie was notorious for theaustere regime in his camp, where thefood was appalling. But those who sur-vived several seasons with him becametough, competent excavators.

The important discoveries contin-ued. In 1888 he found a cemetery ofEgyptian-born Romans of AD 100 to250 at Hawara in the Fayum Depres-sion west of the Nile. Their mummiesbore vivid portraits of the deceased,painted in colored wax on woodenpanels. His excavations at the workers'town of el-Kahun provided a fascinat-ing portrait of the lives of ordinary folkunder the Middle Kingdom pharaoh

A young Flinders Petrie, with a pet dog,outside the rock-cut tomb at Giza in1880, his home for two years. Petrie livedsimply and with only the roughest accom-modations, often commandeering aban-doned tombs for his camp. He was at hisbest in the field and often worked in hisunderwear to deter curious tourists.

W I L L I A M M A T T H E W F L I N D E R S P E T R I E 7 9

These mummies, unearthed by unknownEuropean excavators, await shipment tothe West in Hawara, Egypt, 1 9 1 1 . Even inthe early 20th century, it was relativelyeasy for foreign expeditions to exportmummies and other finds from Egypt.

Senusret II's rule (1897-1878 BC).Another community, Ghurab, dated tothe XVIII Dynasty (1570-1293 BC) andyielded potsherds of brightly paintedMycenaean pottery from distant Greece,found in a walled enclosure close to thetown temple. Petrie was one of the firstto realize that ancient Egyptian civiliza-tion did not flourish in isolation, buttraded with much of the eastern Medi-terranean world. The Ghurab site, welldated by its inscriptions and artifacts,contained highly distinctive paintedMycenaean pottery, imported fromGreece during the site's heyday. Thus,argued Petrie, Mycenaean civilizationon the other side of the Mediterranean,dated to the same period, around 1500to 1200 B.C. This innovative methodmade it possible to use closely datedsites in Egypt to date distant prehistoricsites. Obviously, the same pot frag-ments at Ghurab when found in siteson the Greek mainland provided a datefor an otherwise updateable occupationlevel far from the Nile. This cross-dat-ing method of Petrie's is still widelyused by archaeologists today. ArthurEvans employed cross-dating to datethe Minoan civilization of Crete aquarter century later.

Petrie was now a leading Egyptolo-gist. In his textbook Methods and Aims

in Archaeology, he wrote that he con-sidered himself a collector of "all therequisite information," a tester ofhypotheses, and someone who wove"a history out of scattered evidence."A major test of his skills came at el-Amarna on the Middle Nile, the capi-tal of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten,who ruled briefly over Egypt from 1350to 1334 BC. El-Amarna was the onlyEgyptian capital with no overlying lay-ers of occupation, so Petrie was able toclear large areas of the town, includingthe pharaoh's palace with its magnifi-cent painted frescoes and pavements.Petrie roofed over the palace ruins andopened the site to tourists, who tram-pled a local farmer's crops. The angryvillager promptly destroyed the paint-ings. Fortunately, Petrie had copiedthem. One of Petrie's el-Amarnahelpers was a young archaeologist andartist named Howard Carter, later toachieve world fame for his discoveryof the pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb.

In 1892 Flinders Petrie was appoin-ted the first Professor of Egyptology atthe University of London, a remarkableappointment for a man who neverearned a university degree. Two yearslater Petrie made one of his mostimportant discoveries with the exca-vation of a series of enormous desertcemeteries near the town of Naqadain Upper Egypt. He cleared more than2,000 graves in 1894 alone, each con-taining a skeleton and decorated claypots. Petrie studied them grave bygrave, each as a separate unit, andfound there were gradual changes inthe shapes of vessels and their decora-tion over time. For example, what wereonce practical handles for lifting potseventually degenerated into merepainted squiggles. So many graves werefound that Petrie was able to arrangethem in chronological stages of devel-opment, working back from a royal


"It is sickening to see the rateat which everything is beingdestroyed, and the littleregard paid to preservation."

—William MatthewFlinders Petrie, Pyramidsand Tombs of Egypt (1883)

grave that linked his stages with older,undated graves. This bold and revolu-tionary attempt to date cultures muchearlier than Egyptian civilization wasused for years and described in hisMethods and Aims in Archaeology.

Petrie set a frantic pace of excava-tion and publication. He dug at leastone major site a year and published theresults within 12 months. The seasonof 1899 to 1900 saw him sorting outlooted sites at Abydos, where he foundthe tombs of four of eight 1st Dynastykings. He also uncovered an inscriptionof the pharaoh Merneptah (1212-1202BC), which provided the first knownreference to the Kingdom of Israel.Unfortunately, Petrie had a somewhatabrasive and forthright personality,which led him to quarrel with theEgyptian authorities and with manyarchaeologists over permits, excavationmethods, and his interpretations ofancient Egyptian archaeology. His lackof formal education caused him tobelieve that he alone was right and toignore the work of expert colleagues.

However, he introduced new exca-vation methods and trained a genera-tion of Egyptologists who refined hisapproaches. He continued excavatingin most years until 1926, when newand stringent antiquities laws cameinto force to control foreign excava-tions along the Nile. These came as a

direct result of the discovery of Tutan-khamun's tomb. They were enacted toprevent the export of most finds, andcertainly the selling of them. Petrie hadpaid for his excavations by selling arti-facts to overseas museums and could nolonger work in Egypt. Now his majorsource of funding was removed. After40 years of fieldwork, he abruptly trans-ferred his attentions to Palestine.

Petrie had worked for the London-based Palestine Exploration Fund asearly as 1890. The fund had previouslysupported work in Jerusalem, followingup on the efforts of Charles Warren.Flinders Petrie chose the city mound ofTell el-Hesi in southern Israel, whereflood waters from a nearby valley hadcut through the deep layers of themound. Instead of excavating enor-mous trenches, Petrie simply took sam-ples of pottery from each layer withvery little effort. He then laid these outin the laboratory and produced achronology of pot styles for the regionas well as for this Bronze and Iron Agesite of the first and second millenniaBC. He found many Egyptian objects ofknown age in the layers of Tell es-Hesiand used them to cross-date the sitefrom Egyptian ones. Petrie's potteryclassification has been much modifiedsince 1890, but is still in use today.Upon his return to Palestine in 1926,he continued using this scheme as hecarried out several major excavationsuntil his death in 1942.

FURTHER READING

Drower, Margaret S. Flinders Petrie: A Lifein Archaeology. London: Gollancz, 1985.

Petrie, W.M. Flinders. Ancient Egypt andAncient Israel. 1931. Reprint, Golden,Colo.: Ares, 1995.

. The Arts and Crafts of AncientEgypt. 1910. Reprint, Collingdale, Pa.:DIANE Publishing, 1998.

WilliamMatthewFlindersPetrieBORN

June 3, 1853Charlton, England

DIED

July 28, 1942Jerusalem, Palestine

EDUCATION

No formal schooling

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

First professor of Egyptology at theUniversity of London; introducednew excavation and survey methodsto Egyptology; carried out the firstaccurate survey of the pyramids ofGiza; made many important discov-eries at Tanis, Naucratis, el-Amarna,Abydos, and many other sites. De-veloped sequence dating for pre-Dynastic Egypt, and cross-datingusing imports of known age to datesites outside Egypt; his Palestinianexcavations clarified Bronze Ageand Iron Age chronology in theeastern Mediterranean. Wrote Pyra-mids and Tombs of Egypt (1883);Diospolis Parva (1901); Methods andAims in Archaeology (1904); TheArts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt(1910); Ancient Egypt and AncientIsrael (1931).

W I L L I A M M A T T H E W F L I N D E R S P E T R I E 8 1

GertrudeBell

D E S E R T S , P O L I T I C S ,A N D M U S E U M S

ertrude Bell once wrote in an undated essay:"The great twin rivers, gloriously named;the huge Babylonian plains, now desert,which were once a garden of the world, theirstory stretching back into the dark recesses

of time—they shout romance." This no-nonsense deserttraveler and archaeologist had a passion for desert landsand Mesopotamia, the cradle of the world's first civilization.She blazed trails across the Syrian desert when womenrarely traveled alone, and became a respected archaeologistat a time when Near East excavators were few, and invari-ably men. She was also responsible for the founding of theIraq Museum.

Bell was born into the family of a wealthy iron foundryowner in Yorkshire, England, in 1868. She studied at Oxfordin 1886, at a time when few women undergraduates attended

Gertrude Bell observes an excavation at Ur. Visits by Bell wereimportant occasions, as she supervised the division of findsbetween the new Iraq Museum and Leonard Woolley's spon-soring museum. All the archaeologists on the site witnessedthe division.


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the university. A brilliant student, inonly two years she obtained a modernhistory degree while enjoying an activesocial life. She graduated with an out-spoken manner and a passion for travel,which she indulged with a trip toTehran, Persia, in 1892, which at thetime was well off the beaten track formost travelers, especially women. Shealso became interested in mountainclimbing and was soon recognized asone of the leading female climbers ofher day.

Bell discovered archaeology duringa seven-month stay in Jerusalem, whenshe traveled across the desert to Petraand visited the Greek ruins at Palmyra,Syria. A gifted linguist, she learned tospeak fluent Arabic and spent the nextfew years studying archaeology in Parisand Rome. At the same time, she stud-ied Byzantine churches in Turkey, pub-lishing an expert study of the ByzantineThousand and One Churches at Bir-binkilise, which have now largely van-ished. This work established her as arespected scholar.

In 1909 Bell set off with a smallmilitary escort across the Syrian Desertfrom Damascus to the Euphrates River,and then on to the territory of theDeleim Arabs, who were notorious forkidnapping or robbing travelers. Herdestination was the walled Abbasid(Islamic) caliphs' palace at Ukhaidir, ahuge castle dating to the 6th centuryAD set in a fortified enclosure that hadnever been described scientificallybefore. In real danger of attack fromdesert nomads anxious for booty, shespent four days surveying the palacesurrounded by heavily armed guards.The Ukhaidir journey was a turningpoint for Bell's career. Her fluentArabic enabled her to pick up subtleundercurrents of political revolt andthe early stirrings of Arab nationalism.She also made the acquaintance ofimportant desert chieftains, contactsthat were to stand her in good stead inlater years. Her most famous book,

From Amurath to Amurath, appeared towide acclaim in 1911. Three years latershe published a detailed report on thegreat palace.

By now, Bell enjoyed a high repu-tation with desert chieftains. Overinnumerable cups of coffee she learnedthe subtle shifts of desert politics andacquired an intimate knowledge oflocal political conditions. In contrast,the male British government officialsin the region regarded her as opinion-ated and outspoken—a political liabil-ity. Right up to the outbreak of WorldWar I in 1914, Bell was constantly onthe move. She penetrated deep intoSaudi Arabia, to the remote desert cityof Hail, where the suspicious rulerimprisoned her as a spy. Bell acquiredher expert knowledge of Arabia andthe desert at a time when what is nowIraq was assuming great importancebecause of its oil. By 1914 the RoyalNavy depended more on oil than oncoal to fuel its ships. A rising marketfor automobiles also increasedBritain's dependency on Arabianpetroleum deposits.

In 1915 Bell was appointed to theArab Intelligence Bureau of the Britisharmy in Cairo, Egypt, the only womanamong dozens of military officers. Thearmy regarded her with suspicion, bothon account of her gender and becauseof her fluent Arabic. But she soonbecame indispensable, flattering desertchiefs, interviewing them, making useof her unrivaled knowledge of desertlands to keep a finger on the politicalpulse. The authorities transferred herto Basra on the Persian Gulf in 1916,where she served as a political officerduring the critical years when Iraqbecame a monarchy under King Feisal.Bell worked with British High Com-missioner Sir Percy Cox, serving as hisOriental Secretary. She was in her ele-ment, working with powerful sheikhs,defusing quarrels before they boiledover, paving the way to create a uni-fied state in Mesopotamia. But as the

Gertrude BellBORNJuly 14, 1868Washington, Durham, England

DIED

July 12, 1926Baghdad, Iraq

EDUCATION

Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford Univer-sity (B.A. 1888)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Expert desert traveler and archaeolo-gist; studied the Thousand and OneChurches at Birbinkilise, Turkey, andthe Abbasid Palace at Ukhaidir;founded the Iraq Antiquities Serviceand Museum. Wrote The Desert andthe Sown (1907); The Thousand andOne Churches (with Sir WilliamRamsey; 1909); From Amurath toAmurath (1911); Palace and Mosqueat Ukhaidir (1914).

G E R T R U D E B E L L • 8 3

Dressed in a long skirt and sun hood,Gertrude Bell measures a building at the6th-century fortified Abbasid palace atUkhaidir, 75 miles (120 kilometers) southof Baghdad in southern Iraq, in 1909. Bell'sgoal was to record the dimensions ofthe little-known stone and wood Islamicpalace, which was rapidly decaying in theharsh desert climate.

structure of government became moreformalized, the outspoken Gertrude Bellwas tactfully shunted aside. Increas-ingly, she led a busy life outside govern-ment, filling her time with archaeology,dogs, photography, and people of everykind. Her intense sympathy for theArabs made her somewhat suspectto starched and conventional Britishcolonial officials. Eventually, her onlyadministrative responsibility wasarchaeology. From this responsibilitycame the Iraq Museum.

When World War I ended in 1918,scholars from America and Europewere anxious to resume excavations inMesopotamia. German archaeologistshad been reconstructing ancient Baby-lon for more than a decade before thewar. French archaeologists were anx-ious to excavate at least one ancientcity in the heart of Mesopotamia. TheBritish Museum and the University of

Pennsylvania sought an excavationpermit to conduct a major excavationat Ur, celebrated in the Old Testamentas Abraham's city. They planned adig to be headed by British excavatorLeonard Woolley. Bell sat down toorganize an Iraqi Department of Antiq-uities, with responsibility for grantingexcavation permits, and to establish anew Iraq Museum to house artifactsfound in the digs made by foreigners.She was in a difficult position. Foreignexpeditions wanted as many finds aspossible. Iraqis felt strongly that at leasthalf the artifacts from any excavationshould stay in the country. She drafteda new antiquities law that steered acareful course between the two view-points. The first test of the new regula-tions came at Ur.

Leonard Woolley was an expertexcavator, with a genius for workingwith large numbers of workers. He


"I have found myself longing for an hour out of a remotecentury, wherein I might look my fill upon the walk thathave fallen and stamp the image of a dead world indeliblyupon my mind."

—Gertrude Bell, From Amurath to Amurath (1911)

started work at Ur in 1922, excavatingthe ancient Sumerian and biblical cityon an enormous scale under Bell's eagleeye. Woolley was a strong characterwho was not afraid to speak his mind.In Gertrude Bell he encountered a for-midable opponent who looked out forIraqi interests before anything else. Bellwould disembark at the tiny Ur railroadstation and spend hours at the excava-tions even on the hottest days. Woolleydreaded her visit at the end of eachdigging season, for he had to fight hardto keep his finds, with two powerfuloverseas museums looking over hisshoulder. Fortunately, the two strongpersonalities respected each other.They would argue for hours, taking theprecaution of enlisting the services ofan impartial mediator if they could notagree. Even Woolley quietly admittedthat he was satisfied with the divisionof finds, but never to Bell herself.

Foreign excavators lived in appre-hension of her awesome powers. "Whodecides if we disagree?" asked Britisharchaeologist Stephen Langdon ofOxford University, working at theSumerian city of Kish. "I replied thatI did," wrote Bell in her diary. "But heneedn't be afraid for he would find meeager to oblige." In recent years, Bellhas been criticized severely by Iraqis for

surrendering too much of their nationalheritage. But she worked in a world ofstrong imperial powers, which had littlerespect for new nations or their antiq-uities and would simply commandeerthem if challenged.

Back in Baghdad, Bell moved thecollections into a few shabby roomsnear the royal palace, until the govern-ment gave the new Iraq Museum a per-manent home. She spent long hourscataloging potsherds and arranging thecollections. Highhanded, even arro-gant, Gertrude Bell felt an obligationto the new country of Iraq and its cul-tural heritage that few locals or foreign-ers shared at the time.

Eventually, the debilitating sum-mer heat of Baghdad undermined herhealth and mental well being, alreadyweakened by chronic overwork. In1926, the 58-year-old Bell committedsuicide with an overdose of sleepingpills. Huge crowds from all segments ofBaghdad society attended her funeral.

FURTHER READING

Wallach, Janet. Desert Queen. New York:Doubleday, 1996.

Winstone, H. V. F. Gertrude Bell. NewYork: Quartet, 1978.

G E R T R U D E B E L L 8 5

HenriBreuil

ROCK A R T P I O N E E R

ew people have the stamina or the dedicationto lie on their backs, more than 100 feet (30meters) underground for weeks and monthson end, copying ancient rock paintings. AbbeHenri Breuil devoted years to Ice Age art,

tracing, copying, and sketching at a time when color photog-raphy lay far in the future. His paintings of prehistoric bisonat Altamira Cave in northern Spain defined ancient rockart for a generation.

Henri Breuil was born at Mortain in France's La Manchedepartment, in 1877. Little is known of his childhood years,but he entered the Catholic seminary of Saint-Sulpice in1895 to become a priest. There he came under the influenceof Abbe Guibert, Professor of Natural Science, who intro-duced him not only to the study of prehistoric archaeol-ogy, but to the theory of evolution and natural selection.That was very progressive for a Catholic teacher of the day,because the church had little tolerance for unorthodox

Abbe Breuil inspects rock paintings at Lascaux, France.The Las-caux paintings, executed by unknown late-Ice Age artists of15,000 years ago, depict the animals that the people hunted.


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thinking. At first Breuil was attractedto botany, but prehistory soon becamehis obsession. Guibert encouragedhim to describe stone implements andbronze artifacts from private collec-tions. After his first year at the semi-nary, Breuil participated in the excava-tion of a Stone Age (Neolithic) farm-ing settlement at Champigny with thewell-known archaeologist Louis Capi-tan. But a visit to the picturesque Dor-dogne region of southwestern Francein that year changed his life.

The village of Les Eyzies is sur-rounded by huge limestone rock shel-ters, once occupied by late Ice Agereindeer hunters, known as the Cro-Magnons, after a rock shelter of thatname near the local railroad station.At the time of Breuil's first visit, StoneAge archaeology was in its infancy.He met Edouard Piette, one of the fewtruly rigorous 19th-century scientistsstudying the people of the so-calledReindeer Age. In later life, Breuilcalled Piette his mentor, from whomhe received hands-on instruction inartifact classification. But Piette was alocal scholar, interested only in a tinyarea around Les Eyzies and in thePyrenees Mountains. Breuil had amuch broader perspective, and bothrefined and expanded Piette's work toa much larger area encompassing thewhole of western Europe.

Breuil was ordained as a priest in1900, at a time when the Catholicchurch had rejected the existence offossil humans on the grounds that theychallenged the findings of the Old Tes-tament. He came to prehistory froma theological background as part of amovement among scientifically inclinedpriests to reconcile prehistory andresearch into human evolution, withreligious beliefs. One of his closestfriends was a remarkable Jesuit, FatherTeilhard de Chardin, who conceivedof the evolution of life as having been"metaphysically oriented toward theappearance [evolutionary emergence]

of humans, in whom the reunion ofspirit and matter was realized." In otherwords, science had much to tell usabout early humanity, and could doso without challenging the belief thatgod created humankind. Breuil andChardin worked together in Franceand later in China.

For 30 years after 1900, prehistoricarchaeology in France was dominatedby Breuil and his fellow priests such asthe Abbe Bouyssonnie. Catholic priestswere engaged in archaeology because ofits intellectual and spiritual challenges.At the same time, they were scholarswith stipends from the church, consid-erable spare time, also freedom to exca-vate, travel, and visit museums, at atime when archaeological jobs wererare. Henri Breuil may have been aCatholic priest, but he rarely allowedhis ecclesiastical background to inter-fere with his archaeology. His researchesinto the Stone Age peoples of Franceand their remarkable cave art soonreceived wide attention.

Henri Breuil came to Les Eyzies ata time when archaeologists were grap-pling with ways to subdivide a longsequence of Stone Age hunter-gatherersocieties in terms of their biologicaland cultural evolution. Edward Lartetwas one of the first to dig the greatStone Age rock shelters of southwest-ern France. He proposed a subdivisionof the rock shelter occupations intoages of the Mammoth, the Cave Bear,the Reindeer, and the wild ox orAurochs, the latter period occurringafter the Ice Age. Each age was namedfor the animal bones that were domi-nant in different stratified levels of hissites. Breuil and others (among themGabrielle de Mortillet) focused onstone, bone, and antler artifacts, treat-ing them as if they were human-madefossils which changed from one periodof the late Ice Age to another.

In 1905 the young priest presen-ted a scientific paper at the first Prehis-toric Congress of France, a gathering of

Henri BreuilBORNFebruary 28, 1877Mortain, France

DIED

August 14, 1961Paris, France

EDUCATION

Saint-Sulpice Seminary, Montreal(ordained 1900)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Carried out the first systematic sur-veys and interpretations of late IceAge rock art in Europe, studied rockart in many other parts of the world,including southern Africa; devel-oped the first elaborate, artifact-based classification of late Ice Agehunter-gatherer cultures, whichremained the standard for genera-tions. Wrote La Prehistoire (1937),400 Centuries of Cave Art (1952);The Cave of Altamira at Santillanadel Mar, Spain (with Hugo Ober-maier, 1935).

H E N R I B R E U I L 8 7

These two paintings of bison from Alta-mira, Spain, are classic examples of Breuil'sexquisite copies of Ice Age rock art.

eminent archaeologists. There he sum-marized his studies of artifacts made bypeople of Piette's "Age of Reindeer."He criticized Mortillet and others forthinking of Stone Age prehistory as aseries of universal stages that could beidentified by different characteristicstone or antler artifacts made overenormous areas of the world. Rather,he said, the archaic Neanderthal peo-ple—whose characteristic stone spearpoints and hide scrapers were found atLe Moustier cave near Les Eyzies, andstratified below later occupations atother rock shelters—were succeededby quite different Stone Age cultures,each with its own distinctive artifactsand other characteristics.

On the strength of this paper andhis cave art researches, Breuil wasappointed a professor at the Universityof Freiburg in 1905. Five years later hewas appointed professor at the newlyfounded Institute of Human Paleon-tology in Paris, sponsored by PrinceAlbert of Monaco.

In a series of authoritative confer-ence papers and articles, Breuil nowlaid out an elaborate subdivision ofStone Age cultures in southwesternFrance and northern Spain. Each cul-ture, named after a major site: Aurigna-cian (Aurignac), Solutrean (Solutre),and Magdalenian (La Madeleine).Each had unfolding stages, and wasmarked by differences in artifact form.The Aurignacians used split-basedbone points and fine scrapers, theSolutreans fabricated intricatelyworked leaf-shaped.stone spear points,and the Magdalenians were masters ofantler technology to make harpoons,needles, and other fine tools.

In a classic paper, "The Subdivi-sions of the Upper Paleolithic andTheir Significance," published in 1912,

Breuil laid out this classificationscheme. It has been the basis of allFrench Stone Age archaeology eversince. During the rest of his career hemodified his scheme again and again,changing from one series of cultures toparallel tracks of human development,each reflected in different artifactforms. For example, he proposed thathis Aurignacian culture had existed insouthwestern France at the same timeas another tradition, using finely madestone spear points, known as the Perig-ordian. The two traditions existedalongside one another until the Solu-trean and Magdalenian cultures super-seded them. The different Stone Agegroups had either migrated into west-em Europe from the east or had devel-oped one from another. Breuil's outlinefor Stone Age Europe forms the foun-dation for the far more elaborateresearches of today.

Breuil was not a great archaeologi-cal thinker. Rather, he was a techni-cian, a genius at detailed classification,a master of the minute features of indi-vidual artifacts. His background was ingeology, in layers and fossils. But hewas also a gifted artist who made roughcopies in the field, then rendered themin pen and watercolors. He was the firstscholar to undertake a systematic sur-vey of late Ice Age art from northernSpain and southwestern France, theearliest known art tradition.

In 1864, Edouard Lartet was thefirst archaeologist to find beautifullyengraved late Ice Age artifacts. Soonother finds were made, but when Span-ish nobleman Marquis de Sautolafound magnificent bison paintings onthe walls of Altamira cave in northernSpain, they were dismissed as modemrenderings. The young Breuil was oneof those who discovered more painted


"These [Cro-Magnon cave paintings] are the reflections ofreligious organization, of complicated ideas that comparativeethnology alone can revive."

—Henri Breuil, La Prehistoire (1937)

caves near Les Eyzies and helpedauthenticate Altamira. He was the firstarchaeologist to visit the celebratedFont-de-Gaume and Les Combarellescaves, and to describe the magnificentbison of Niaux Cave near the Pyrenees.

Breuil devoted years to copyingintricate friezes of paintings andengravings with an accuracy that stunsmodern observers. He would lie fordays on end on his back, holding paperagainst the painted wall, tracing paint-ings with light only from candles, flash-lights, or a flickering acetylene lamp.Inevitably, as an artist with his owncreative hand, Breuil introduced hisown interpretations into his copies, butuntil improvements in the 1950s thatmade accurate color photography prac-tical in such conditions, they were thedefinitive reproductions of later IceAge art. What did the engravings andpaintings mean? Breuil believed somewere "art for art's sake." Using analo-gies from living peoples, he argued theywere communal religious and magicalexpressions, many of them part of whathe called "hunting magic."

During the course of his longcareer, Breuil became an internationalauthority on rock art, studying paint-ings and engravings at sites as far afieldas eastern Spain, the Sahara, Ethiopia,

and southern Africa. On the strengthof his research, he was appointed to thefirst professorship of prehistory at theCollege de France in 1929. He died inParis in 1961, after an illustrious careerthat saw more than 800 publications.

All Breuil's work, whether onantler or stone artifacts, or on rock art,unfolded at a time of unparalleled dis-coveries and advances in Stone Agearchaeology. The abbe was above all aclassifier, a copier, and an organizerrather than a thinker. But his pioneerwork on cave art and stone artifacts wasan attempt to understand prehistoriccultures in more human terms than hadbeen the case with his Victorian prede-cessors. He thought of Stone Age peo-ple not as brutes and savages, but asthinking human beings. Henri Breuil'sremarkable achievements serve as aninspiration for today's more specializedarchaeologists, who use his work as afoundation for much more sophisticatedinterpretations of the past.

FURTHER READING

Daniel, Glyn. A Short History of Archaeol-ogy. London: Thames and Hudson, 1981.

H E N R I B R E U I L 8 9

HowardCarter

THE TOMB OFT U T A N K H A M U N

Howard Carter, for years an unknownarchaeologist and artist toiling in theheat of Egypt, became an internationalcelebrity overnight simply because hefound an undisturbed pharaoh's tomb.

But what a royal tomb: the last undisturbed sepulcher of anancient Egyptian king, lavishly adorned in gold, the youngoccupant virtually unknown until the dramatic discoveryof his burial place on November 6, 1922. Small wonderthat the names Howard Carter and Tutankhamun becamepermanently linked.

Howard Carter was an unlikely adventurer, the son ofa talented animal painter. He was born in London in 1874.Considered to be a weakling, he was brought up by twoaunts in rural eastern England. From his earliest years hewas happiest alone, recording beetles and birds with brushand pen. The young Carter inherited his father's artisticskills and talent for precise observation, but received only

Howard Carter just inside the opening ofTutankhamun's burialchamber To ensure that there were no doubts as to the undis-turbed state of the pharaoh's burial place, Carter opened thechamber in the presence of senior government officials andother archaeologists. His assistant, Alexander Callendar, is at right.


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a modest education. At age 15 he leftschool and set out to earn a living asan artist under the patronage of a locallandowner, William Tyssen-Amherst, awealthy collector of Egyptian artifacts.Tyssen-Amherst's Egyptian collectionwas as good as that in many publicmuseums, and included many mummiesand documents written on sheets andscrolls of papyrus. The most famous,still called the Amherst papyrus, givesan account of tomb-robbing methodsused by ancient Egyptian thieves, whooften worked with the assistance ofcorrupt officials.

In 1891 the 17-year-old Carteraccepted full-time employment withAmherst, cataloging and illustratingthe collections. Soon Carter's painstak-ing work led to copying tasks at theBritish Museum in London, where hemet the leading Egyptologists of theday. Later that year he went to Egypt torecord the tomb paintings of royal gov-ernors at Beni Hasan in Middle Egyptunder a well-known Egyptologist, PercyNewberry. Carter brought a new stan-dard of copying to the murals, espe-cially those with birds, executing themwith a brilliant command of color andattention to detail. He loved the work."There can be fewer brighter days," hewrote in his diary after an arduous sur-vey of rock-cut nobles' tombs at AlBersha, downstream of Beni Hasan.

The following year, he worked atthe pharaoh Akhenaten's capital atel-Amarna (reigned about 1350 BC)under Flinders Petrie, like himself aself-educated Egyptologist. Akhenatenwas the most controversial of all Egyp-tians, for he challenged the worshipof the god Amun, a personificationof the sun, and replaced it with a cultthat revered the bright disk of the sunitself. He moved his capital away fromAmun's temples at Thebes downstreamfrom el-Amarna. His new city was occu-pied for only 17 years.

Within a few weeks the youngarchaeologist was excavating the king's

"Each [visitor] had a dazed, bewildered look in his eyes, andeach in turn, as he came out, threw up his hands beforehim, an unconscious gesture of impotence to describe inwords the wonders he had seen."

—Howard Carter, The Tomb of Tut.ankh.Amen (1923)

great temple and parts of the town onhis own. Petrie instilled the principlesof disciplined archaeological excava-tion in Carter and gave him a burningdesire to become an excavator. "To methe calling had an extraordinary attrac-tion," he wrote in his journal in 1892.

By this time the quality of Carter'swork ensured him continual employ-ment on a variety of copying assign-ments, culminating in six years copyingthe wall sculptures, paintings, and his-torical inscriptions of the mortuarytemple of Queen Hatshepsut at Deir al-Bahari near Luxor under the directionof Egyptologist Edouard Naville. Carterwas in his element, reviving the artof 4,000 years ago with accuracy andrespect. "In those six years, althoughfull of hard work, I learnt more ofEgyptian Art, its serene simplicity, thanin any other place or time," he wrotein his diary years later. Unlike manycopyists, Carter preserved the spirit ofthe originals. Some authorities rankCarter's wildlife copies alongside thefinest of John James Audubon's Ameri-can bird drawings.

During these years Carter hadbecome a strong, contemplative manwho was quite happy with his owncompany for months on end. In hisspare time he wandered though therocky hills and valleys west of the Nile.His notebooks reveal an increasingobsession with ancient tombs and withthe work of Giovanni Belzoni andother pioneers. In 1899 he acceptedan important post in the Egyptian

H OWA R D C A R T E R 9 1

Carter and an Egyptian assistant carefullyseparate Tutankhamun's mummy from thewalls of the coffin. The ancient priestspoured so much ceremonial oil over theinner coffins that they often adhered toone another

Antiquities Service as Inspector ofMonuments for Upper Egypt, basedin Luxor. This powerful position gaveCarter new authority to enforce antiq-uities law and oversee excavations.He was already familiar with the vastancient Egyptian cemeteries that layin the desert west of the Nile, oppositeLuxor. They were the domain of theancient dead. Carter learned the nar-row paths that crisscrossed the valleysand cliffs, and every corner of the Val-ley of Kings, where Egypt's most power-ful pharaohs were buried more than3,000 years earlier. He supervised exca-vations for American millionaireTheodore Davis, locating the plun-dered tomb of the pharaoh TuthmosisIV, who died in 1386 BC, in the Valleyof Kings.

In 1905 Carter resigned abruptlyand made his living as a freelance artistat Luxor for two years before obtainingemployment with another wealthy

I patron, the Earl of Carnarvon. Ani aristocrat and sportsman, Carnarvon

came to Egypt to recuperate after a

car accident in Germany. He developeda passion for archaeological excavation,which he indulged each winter withCarter's assistance. "He only cared forthe best, and nothing but the bestwould satisfy him," wrote Wallis Budge,a high British Museum official. "Histaste was faultless." Carter and Carnar-von made few spectacular finds, work-ing outside the Valley of Kings, wherecrews employed by Theodore Davis stilllabored. The first season yielded noth-ing more than a "large mummified catin its case." Far from being discour-aged, Carnarvon plunged himself intoarchaeology even more enthusiastically.

Meanwhile, Theodore Davis didfind a scatter of artifacts bearing theroyal seal of an obscure pharaoh namedTutankhamun. Eventually he becamediscouraged by the lack of finds andrelinquished his excavation permitthere. As a result, a 10-year permit forthe Valley of Kings passed into Carnar-von's hands in 1914. But World War Iintervened and excavations did notbegin until three years later.

Carter now began a systematicsearch for the tomb of one of ancientEgypt's least-known pharaohs: the boyking Tutankhamun, who died in about1323 BC. He was convinced that thesepulcher of this obscure king lay inthe valley. For six years, Carter clearedrubble from the floor of the Valley ofKings and found nothing. By 1922Carnarvon had spent the equivalentof several million modem-day dollarswithout any major results. Reluctantly,he agreed to a final season, focused ona small area near the tomb of RamesesVI, where Carter had started work infive years before. Just three days afterstarting work on November 1, 1922,Carter's workers uncovered a flight ofrock-cut stairs leading to a sealed door-way. For three weeks Carter waited


until Carnarvon arrived from England.Then, on November 26, the two menstood in front of the sealed doorwaythat bore the seal of the pharaohTutankhamun. Carter made a smallhole in the plaster and shone a flicker-ing candle into the opening. Impa-tiently, Carnarvon asked him what laywithin. "Yes, wonderful things," Carterreplied, as gold glinted in the faintlight. Howard Carter had discoveredthe undisturbed tomb of Tutankhamun,the only unlooted king's sepulcher everfound in Egypt and one of the greatestarchaeological discoveries of all time.

The find caused a worldwide sensa-tion. The press and hundreds of curiousvisitors descended on the Valley ofKings, threatening to overwhelm thedelicate work of recording the tomb.Both Carter and Carnarvon were undersevere stress, for the experience of find-ing the tomb and the unprecedentedmedia attention overwhelmed them.They had a series of blazing argumentsthat ended with them barely on speak-ing terms. Shortly afterward, Carnar-von was bitten by a mosquito, thennicked open the bite with his razorwhile shaving. The bite turned septic.He was only reconciled with his part-ner a few days before his death onApril 5, 1923, his already delicatehealth undermined by blood poisoning.Inevitably, the press wrote of a deadly"curse of the pharaohs" that had struckCarnarvon down. The fact that manyof Tutankhamun's excavators lived intotheir 80s is conveniently forgotten.

Carter worked on alone. He spent10 arduous years clearing Tutankhamun'stomb, usually with grossly inadequatefunding, but did not live to publish hisextraordinary findings. The AmericanEgyptologist Henry Breasted describedin a letter one of the many dramaticmoments, when he and Carter opened

the innermost shrines and observed thepharaoh's stone sarcophagus within. "Ifelt for the first time the majesty of thepharaoh's presence," he wrote. Nearby,the ostrich feather plumes carried bythe king's servants lay on the floor,crumbled to brown dust. Without suffi-cient money, Carter struggled to per-form miracles of conservation and arti-fact preservation along the way. Forexample, he used plaster and liquid waxinstead of more expensive and moresuitable materials to stabilize fragilewooden thrones. The tremendous stressof the meticulous work and of dealingwith difficult government officials, thepress, and a persistent public wore himdown. Carter passed his last yearsbetween England and Egypt, until hedied in London in 1939, a week shy ofhis 65th birthday.

Carter's Tutankhamun excavationsunfolded as Leonard Woolley was mak-ing impressive finds at Ur in southernIraq. Woolley returned home to aknighthood and honorary degrees frommajor universities. The difficult andsometimes moody Carter received butone official honor: an honorary degreefrom Yale University. Throughout hislife and at the height of his fame,Howard Carter was always an outsider.

FURTHER READING

Carter, Howard, and Arthur Mace. TheTomb of Tut.ankk.Amen Discovered by theLate Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter.3 vols. London: Cassell, 1923-33.

Reeves, Nicholas. The Complete Tutan-khamun. London: Thames and Hudson,1990.

Treasures of Tutankhamun. New York:Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976.

Winstone, W. V. F. Howard Carter and theDiscovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun.London: Constable, 1991.

HowardCarterBORN


DIED


EDUCATION

Parish school in Suffolk, England,and private

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Drew and painted highly accuratenaturalistic copies of ancient Egypt-ian tomb paintings; Excavated withseveral wealthy patrons, notablyLord Edward Carnarvon; discoveredthe tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922.

H OWA R D C A R T E R 9 3

ArthurJohn Evans

M I N O A N C I V I L I Z A T I O N

On June 26, 1926, English archaeologistArthur John Evans lay in bed in his villaclose to the great Palace of Minos at Knossosin Crete. Suddenly, the building creaked andheaved as a strong earthquake rocked north-

em Crete. Nearby church bells rang. Women and childrenscreamed as dwellings collapsed. A dull sound rose from theearth, like the muffled roar of a bull. Evans was electrified.The noise of the earthquake reminded him of the great bullgod of ancient Crete, whose great horns tossed the earth, thegreat Minotaur—half human, half beast—whom the ancientMinoans had sought to appease with constant sacrifice.Evans was convinced he had lived through a reenactment ofthe death of Minoan civilization.

Arthur Evans was born into a family of wealthy Englishpaper manufacturers. His father, John Evans, was a well-known art connoisseur, amateur geologist, and antiquarian(see Part 2), so young Arthur was brought up in a family

Sir Arthur Evans appraises a find. Evans was blessed with sharpeyesight, which enabled him to assess the significance of even thesmallest artifacts. He was the leading expert on Mediterraneanpottery and jewelry of his day.


o

9

with a strong appreciation for art objectsof all kinds, and also for archaeologyand the past.

Evans was educated privately, thenwent to Oxford University in 1870. Ofsmall stature, with keen eyesight andan insatiable curiosity, he complainedthat Oxford life was dull, and spent hissummers trekking over Europe, oftenfar off the beaten track. After graduat-ing from Oxford in 1873, he traveledthrough the Balkans, where he devel-oped a passion for political intrigue andwas arrested by the Austrian police onsuspicion of being a spy. The Manches-ter Guardian newspaper sent Evansback to the Balkans as a special corre-spondent in 1875 to report on theunrest caused by Austrian rule over theregion. Evans threw himself into anatmosphere of constant plotting andrebellion with such enthusiasm thatthe Austrians jailed him for six weekson the grounds that his articles weresubversive. He was then expelled fromthe country forever. Evans was lucky toescape a long prison sentence. In theintervals between rebellions he hadcollected artifacts of all kinds, using hisalmost microscopic eyesight to examineeven the tiniest objects. As a result,Evans began to appreciate small findsin ways his contemporaries did not.

In 1884 Evans was appointedKeeper of the Ashmolean Museum inOxford, a post he held for 25 years.The Ashmolean was a curious dumpingground for antiquities and natural his-tory specimens accumulated by collec-tors and university professors over morethan three centuries. The collectionswere in chaos, the displays haphazard.With characteristic energy, Evansstirred up the neglected and moribundinstitution, lobbying for a new build-ing, and spending much of his time inMediterranean lands adding to his col-lections. His Assistant Keeper answeredall queries by saying: "The Keeper, Sir,is somewhere in Bohemia." These yearsof collecting and travel brought Arthur

Evans in contact with many archaeolo-gists, among them Heinrich Schlie-mann of Troy and Mycenae fame (seePart 2).

Unlike Schliemann, who thoughtof Mycenae as the palace of Homer'shero King Agamemnon, Evans consid-ered it to be the remains of a BronzeAge civilization, a major trading centerwhich received exotic pottery, metals,and engraved gemstones and seals fromother parts of the Greek mainlandand the Aegean islands. Evans hadan advantage over archaeologists. Hisunusual nearsightedness allowed himto examine even the smallest details ofartifacts. He visited antique dealers inAthens, bombarding them with ques-tions about the minute engraved sealsthey sold by the dozen. He soon learnedthey came from the island of Crete.

Like a terrier, Evans followed thescent and decided to excavate onCrete. He dug on the island for thefirst time in 1894, on a hillside namedKnossos, where he found Mycenaeanpottery. For two years he negotiatedwith the local landowners before pur-chasing the site in 1896. By this timehe had traveled throughout the islandand found traces of at least two unde-ciphered ancient writing systems—minute signs written on clay tablets.He named the two kinds of writingLinear A and Linear B, without anyidea of which was the earlier. Thescripts were the first bits of evidence ofa lost culture. Later discoveries wouldshow that it was a great and flourishingcivilization that maintained close tieswith the Greek mainland. Four moreyears passed before Evans started workat Knossos. The delay was because theislanders were fighting their hatedTurkish masters. Characteristically,Evans wrote dispatches about the Cre-tan cause for the Manchester Guardianand distributed relief supplies as he col-lected antiquities.

The Knossos excavations began inMarch 1900 and continued intermittently

Arthur JohnEvansBORNJuly 8, 1851Nash Mills, Hertfordshire, England

DIED

July 1, 1941Oxford, England

EDUCATION

Oxford University (B.A. 1873)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Excavated the Palace of Minos atKnossos, Crete, and discovered theMinoan civilization. Wrote ThePalace of Minos (1921-35), a sys-tematic description of his palaceexcavations.

A R T H U R J O H N E V A N S 9 5

The wooden supports of Knossos's GrandStaircase had rotted by the time ArthurEvans had uncovered them, so he usedreinforced concrete and cement torebuild it in 1905.

for 30 years. On the very first day thediggers uncovered building foundations;on the second, a house with faded walldecorations. Evans realized immediatelythat his new palace was neither Greeknor Roman, but the home of ancientCretan kings. He recovered clay tabletscovered with the mysterious scripts hehad noted before, some with Linear A,others with Linear B. There were alsojewels. He promptly named this hith-erto unknown civilization "Minoan,"after the legendary King Minos of Crete,who was said to have lived at Knossosthousands of years ago. Within a fewmonths Evans had uncovered morethan 2 acres (0.8 hectare) of the palace,including a throne room complete

with stone throne and wall benches,living quarters, storage chambers, anda magnificent wall painting of a malecupbearer. Evans sent for Swiss artistEmile Guillieron, who helped himreconstruct the palace paintings: youngpeople in formal processions, a youngboy gathering saffron, mythical griffinsand other beasts, and reliefs of chargingbulls. Unlike some of his faster workingpredecessors, Evans filled notebook afternotebook with meticulous notes of lay-ers and small finds, with architecturaldetails of individual rooms.

The Palace of Minos at Knossoswas an extraordinary structure builtaround a central courtyard, enteredfrom the north through a pillared hall.


"Less than a generation back the origin of Greek civilization,and with it the sources of all great culture that has ever been,were wrapped in an impenetrable mist."

—Arthur John Evans, "The Palace of Minos" MonthlyReview (March 1901)

Rows of storage rooms opened into anarrow passageway to the west of thecourtyard, with the capacity to store atleast 75,000 gallons (284,000 liters) ofolive oil alone. Two staircases of impos-ing design led to what Evans believedwere the royal living quarters below. In1908 Evans inherited a large fortunefrom a relative, much of which hespent on an ambitious architecturalreconstruction of portions of the palace.By judicious rebuilding and reconstruc-tion, he tried to show both Cretans andtourists an impression of Minoan civi-lization. He replaced wooden columnswith concrete pillars painted to con-form with Minoan decor. Any recon-struction of an archaeological site iscontroversial, but on the whole Evanssucceeded in giving a fair impression ofparts of the palace, even if his recon-structed wall friezes owe a considerableamount to his fertile imagination.

All later research on the Minoancivilization and its chronology beginswith Arthur Evans's excavations. From1900 to 1935 Evans commuted betweenKnossos and Oxford, studying the thou-sands of potsherds and other small findsfrom the palace. He had no radiocar-bon dating methods or other modernchronological techniques to date thepalace. Fortunately, the Minoans hadtraded with many other lands, includingEgypt, where accurately dated artifacts

abounded. By using Egyptian cross-references, Evans produced the firstchronological framework for Minoancivilization, beginning with simple vil-lage farmers before 3000 BC. By thatdate "Early Minoans" were tradingwith other Aegean islands and Cyprus.Between 2200 and 1250 BC, the Middleand Late Minoan periods saw Cretancivilization at its height. The island wasdensely settled. Minoan ships traded asfar afield as Egypt and Syria. The palaceitself was rebuilt many times over itslong life, partly because of earthquakedamage, then abandoned before Minoancivilization collapsed in about 1200 BC.Today's chronologies place the end ofthe Minoans up to two centuries ear-lier, but the general outlines of Evans'sframework are still in place.

Arthur Evans devoted the rest ofhis life to Knossos and the Minoans.He published his great four-volumereport, The Palace of Minos at Knossos,over 14 years between 1921 and 1935,a colossal task by any standards. Hepainted a picture of a colorful, peacefulcivilization with gifted artists, wherebulls and a goddess of fertility played acentral role in human life. But despitedecades of effort, Evans failed to deci-pher the mysterious Cretan script,which had been the original objectivein 1900. King George V knighted himfor his work in 1931. Sir Arthur Evans

died at the age of 90 in 1941. Elevenyears later, another Englishman,Michael Ventris, unlocked some of thesecrets of the script, which is still onlypartially deciphered to this day.

Few archaeologists discover lostcivilizations, but Arthur John Evanswas one of those few. His pioneeringresearches on Minoan civilization have,for the most part, stood the test of time.Radiocarbon dates and more refinedexcavation methods have changedmany details, as archaeologists exca-vate further at Knossos and otherlesser Minoan palaces. However, thesechanges in no way diminish the greatachievements of an archaeologist bomin the 19th century who excavated alost civilization with methods belong-ing to the 20th.

FURTHER READING

Evans, Joan. Time and Chance. London:Longmans, 1942.

MacGillivary, John Alexander. Minotaur:Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology ofthe Minoan Myth. New York: Hill andWang, 2000.

A R T H U R J O H N E V A N S 9 7

Harriet

EXCAVATOR OFGOURNIA , C R E T E

You would think us mad, runningfrom one fallen rock to another, dis-cussing the number of columns, theuse of this threshold or that con-duit," wrote Harriet Boyd Hawes in

a letter from Epidauros, Greece, in 1896. But this was hermost profound enthusiasm, at a time when few women everbecame archaeologists or went into the field. She was awoman of deep passions—for archaeology and the ancientMinoan civilization, for social justice and an end to war. Sheblazed a trail for women in archaeology both with her exca-vations on Crete and in the classroom.

Hawes was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a family inthe firefighting equipment business. At an early age she hadan easy familiarity with the technology of hoses and fire-fighting foam. Her mother died when she was 10 months old.Hawes grew up in a family of four brothers, an experiencethat taught her to stand up for herself at an early age. Sheentered Smith College in 1881, where she developed a pas-sion for the plight of workers and for humanitarian causes.At Smith she met Amelia Edwards, a British novelist turnedEgyptologist, who came to lecture at the college and kindledher interest in ancient civilizations. After graduating in 1885,Hawes worked for some years as a teacher in private schools,eventually saving enough money to travel to Europe in 1895.

Europe was a revelation. Hawes fell in love with classi-cal Greece and returned in 1896 to study at the BritishSchool of Archaeology in Athens. A fortunate encounterwith the sister of actress Sarah Bemhardt on a train gave heraccess to high society in Athens and to the Greek royalcourt. (Greece at the time was still a monarchy.) Alreadyindependent-minded, she caused a stir by riding around thecapital on a bicycle. In the intervals between social activi-ties, Hawes studied ancient and modern Greek and touredthe major archaeological sites. At the same time she fol-lowed the tumultuous politics of southeastern Europe, thenas now a whirlwind of competing factions.

When war broke out between Greece and Turkey in1897, Hawes volunteered for Red Cross duty in centralGreece. She encountered the horrors of war firsthand, tend-ing the wounded and coming under fire on several occasionswhile evacuating dying soldiers from the battlefield. Eventu-ally she became accustomed to hardship and the terribleconditions of the field hospitals, where men lay so closetogether it was hard to dress their wounds. When the fight-ing ended, she stayed on to nurse victims of a typhoid epi-demic among the troops. The Greeks never forgot the debtthey owed Harriet Hawes.

• A R C H A E O L O G I S T S

Boyd Hawes

"Y

98

Back in the United States, Haweswon an 1898 Yale University ResearchFellowship to study inscriptions atancient Eleusis near Athens. However,she wanted to excavate, an archaeo-logical activity which the AmericanSchool of Classical Studies in Athensconsidered "men's work." By chance,she met a Cretan refugee who had fledfrom civil war on the island. He urgedher to visit his homeland, where almostno one was digging. She contactedBritish archaeologist David Hogarth,who was already excavating on theisland, and Arthur Evans, who wasabout to start work at the Palace ofMinos at Knossos. They encouragedher plans, as did none other thanSophia Schliemann, Heinrich's widow,who lived in Athens. This formidablepersonality arranged for Hawes tomeet other prominent archaeologistswho were passing through the city.Among them was German excavatorWilhelm Dorpfeld, who had takenover the excavations at Troy afterSchliemann's death.

Hawes arrived on Crete at a timewhen there were only 12 miles (19

kilometers) of paved roads. Archaeolo-gists had to travel on muleback, andHawes was no exception. She exploreda stretch of the north coast aroundMirabella Bay, following Evans's andHogarth's advice to talk to the localpeople. Soon word of her explorationsspread. Farmers brought her potsherds,bronze tools, and other artifacts plowedup from their fields. Then one peasanttook her to Gournia Bay, where shefound the foundations of stone wallsand hundreds of painted potsherds.More artifacts came from the nearbyhillside, and there were traces of smallhouses and a narrow stone-paved alley-way. The next day she returned with acrew of workers. Soon she had 100 menand 10 girls at work uncovering a smallMinoan town, with potsherds andother finds identical to those beingfound by Arthur Evans at the Palace ofKnossos to the west.

The Gournia excavations were anextraordinary achievement by any stan-dards, the more so because they werecarried out with very little money, by awoman living almost alone. Haweslived in a rat-infested hovel near the

Harriet Hawes and her mule party carrysupplies on the road near Canea, Crete.She is on her way to her excavations atGournia. Gournia was a remote place,and she had to import all her equipment,surveying instruments, food, and medicineon the backs of mules.

H A R R I E T B O Y D H A W E S 9 9

A partial inventory of Hawes's finds fromGournia, Crete. Her notes describe indi-vidual artifacts such as beads and clay ves-sels. She has assigned each artifact a num-ber and provided a brief description,including its exact position in the dig.

shore, while her crew camped underbrush shelters. Everyone started work at6 a.m. and finished 12 hours later, witha two-hour break in the middle of theday. Over three years of arduous, inter-mittent excavation, Hawes uncovereda compact, unfortified town with nar-row paved alleyways and small stonehouses. Steps led to a small courtyardand what may have been a tiny palace.During the excavations, Hawes exposed

nearly 3 acres (1.2 hectares) of thetown and 75 dwellings, some withseven or eight rooms. The months ofher excavation were some of the hap-piest times of her life. She was like aqueen among the local villagers, dis-pensing medicines and even setting upa small lending library for her workers.At Gournia she met her future hus-band, Charles Henry Hawes, a quiettraveler with a taste for anthropology,who had arrived out of curiosity to seethe site.

The Gournia excavations were atriumph. In 1902 Hawes became thefirst woman to lecture before theArchaeological Institute of America.Her work was praised for its value byfellow archaeologists, and in additionbecause she had dug the town virtuallywithout expert colleagues, assisted onlyby a team of Cretan villagers. She pub-lished a book on Gournia in 1909, pay-ing for its publication from her ownpocket and with subscriptions con-tributed by potential readers living asfar afield as Australia. She insisted onaccurate drawings and beautiful colorplates to illustrate artifacts that wereunknown outside Greece. The Gourniamonograph is still of value today.

Had World War I not intervened,Harriet Hawes would certainly havereturned to Crete, and perhaps to Gour-nia. By this time she and her husbandhad the responsibilities of parenthoodadded to their professional duties. Butshe was appalled by the human suffer-ing caused by the war. As the Germanarmy advanced on Serbia, she usedmost of her family's savings to pur-chase a ton of food and clothing. Thenshe set off for the island of Corfu offeastern Greece in February 1916,representing an organization calledthe American Distribution Service.

1 0 0 A R C H A E O L O G I S T S

HarrietBoyd HawesBORNOctober 11, 1871Boston, Massachusetts

DIED

March 31, 1945Boston, Massachusetts

EDUCATION

Smith College, (B.A. 1885)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

First woman to excavate on Crete;discovered and investigated Gour-nia, a Minoan town; taught archae-ology at Wellesley College for manyyears; led humanitarian work inGreece and on Western Front inWorld War I. Wrote Gournia, Vasi-liki and Other Prehistoric Sites on theIsthmus of lerapetra, Greece (1908).

"Our men . . . workedvigorously, uncovering thehome of a highland chieftainof Homers time, exploringhis 13 rooms and discoveringhis household utensils andhis stone gaming-table, theoldest circular one yet foundin Greek lands."

—from Harriet Hawes'sdiary (May 1900)

Thousands of starving Serbian soldiershad fled to Corfu. The Greek authori-ties quartered the sick and dying underprimitive tents on a small island nearby.Hawes effectively took charge of theisland, delivering supplies, cookingmeals, and eventually building a tem-porary barracks. She achieved near mir-acles under terrible conditions, payingclosest attention to the dying, whowere accommodated in a special tent.The Corfu experience had a powerfuleffect on her. When she returned tothe United States, she refused to lec-ture about archaeology, only about herwartime experiences. Archaeology, shesaid, was unimportant in times of war.She ended World War I as a nurse vol-unteer in American Red Cross MilitaryHospital Number 5 near Paris. Callingherself the "Old Lady Aide," sheinsisted on working the night shift.

In 1918, Henry Hawes became thefinancial officer of Boston's Museum ofFine Arts. Harriet Hawes threw herself

into teaching the history of ancient artat nearby Wellesley College, a courseshe taught for 16 years. She returnedto Crete just once—in 1926 with herdaughter Mary. This time she was arespected and beloved celebrity. ArthurEvans himself gave her a tour of theKnossos excavations. She traveled toGounia on a mule to a rapturous wel-come from the local people and foundthe site unchanged. Back home, shecontinued to teach, but became increas-ingly preoccupied with socialism andunion politics rather than archaeology.Always an activist, she insisted on trav-eling in Czechoslovakia as the Naziswere entering the country. She spentWorld War II in Massachusetts, nursingher ailing husband and growing vegeta-bles for the war effort. She died soonafter her husband, on March 31, 1945.

By 1939, this pioneer archaeologisthad been almost forgotten. Severalimportant books and articles on Minoanarchaeology actually gave credit for theGournia excavations to a male archae-ologist, Rodney Seager, who had actedbriefly as one of her assistants, thengone on to excavate other well-knownMinoan sites. Were he alive today, Sea-ger would have been the first to giveher credit. The Gournia report showsthat Harriet Boyd Hawes was the equalof any archaeologist of her day. Only inrecent years has her important contri-bution to archaeology been recog-nized with the publication of herbiography in 1992, and because of anincreased interest in the careers ofearly women archaeologists.

FURTHER READING

Allsebrook, Mary. Born to Rebel: The Life ofHarriet Boyd Hawes. Oxford: Oxbow, 1992.

H A R R I E T B O Y D H A W E S • 1 0 1

AlfredVincentKidder

A P I O N E E R OFS O U T H W E S T E R NA R C H A E O L O G Y

lfred Vincent Kidder was a pioneer of NorthAmerican archaeology. His excavations atPecos Pueblo in the Southwest between 1915and 1922 revolutionized our understanding ofthe ancient Pueblo Indian societies of the region

Kidder was bom at Marquette, Michigan, in 1885. Whenhe was seven years old, his family moved to Cambridge, Massa-chusetts, where his well-read father, a retired businessman,befriended many of the leading scientists of the day. The youngKidder met archaeologist Raphael Pumpelly, who was excavat-ing cities in Central Asia, Alexander Agassiz, one of the pio-neers of Ice Age geology, and the Harvard archaeologist Freder-ick Ward Putnam, an expert on the ancient mound-buildercultures of eastern North America. He attended the best pri-vate schools, grew up in an atmosphere of intellectual curiosityand scholarship, and acquired a lifelong interest in naturalhistory as a result. At age 15 he published an article on birds.

In 1904 Kidder entered Harvard with the intention ofbecoming a physician. But his dislike of chemistry and mathe-matics turned his thoughts in other directions. During hisjunior year, in 1907, he applied for a summer field survey inthe Southwest under the direction of archaeologist EdgarHewitt. The survey was nominally a field school, but Hewitt

Alfred Kidder takes a break by resting outside a Pueblo dwelling inPecos, New Mexico. Kidder's excavation technique of examiningstratified layers of debris transformed our understanding of thePueblo Indian culture.

1 0 2 • A R C H A E O L O G I S T S

A

merely showed Kidder and his com-panions the area they were to workon and left them to it. He reappearedevery six or seven weeks on horsebackto check on their progress, assumingcorrectly that the undergraduateswould develop their own methods.Kidder and his now close friend Syl-vanus Morley, later to become aneminent Maya archaeologist, mappedsites in Colorado and New Mexico.The summer changed Kidder's life. Hereturned to Harvard, where he took uparchaeology seriously. He graduated in1908, then spent another field seasonwith Hewitt, this time in Utah.

In 1908 Alfred Kidder enteredgraduate school at Harvard Universityto work on a doctorate in anthropol-ogy. He received training in field meth-ods from the Egyptologist George Reis-ner. Art historian George Chase gavehim a sound grounding in the analysisof ceramic (clay) vessels of all kinds. Itwas no coincidence that Kidder's doc-toral dissertation was on the style anddecorative motifs of Pueblo pottery.Harvard was a remarkable experiencefor Kidder; the rich curriculum includedan opportunity to take courses fromanthropologist Franz Boas, who was avisitor for a term. Boas was a fanatic forminor details and the cultural traits ofNative American civilizations. He gaveKidder a sense of the importance ofdetailed analysis of any human society,something Kidder took to heart.

While studying for his doctorate,Kidder excavated in Newfoundland andagain in the Southwest. He also trav-eled in the Near East, where he had achance to visit excavations by GeorgeReisner and others on the Nile. Therehe absorbed excavation methods un-known in the United States, such as thesystematic excavation of human burialsand careful observation of sequences ofhuman occupation through time. Suchtechniques were still in their infancy.He also realized just how important thehumble pot fragments and other tiny

artifacts were for the study of the past.These lessons served him well in theSouthwest. He received his doctoratein 1914, just before the outbreak ofWorld War I.

In 1915 Kidder embarked on themost important work of his career. Hestarted excavating into the deep, strati-fied layers of Pecos Pueblo, New Mex-ico, a settlement close to a Spanishmission, and known to have been occu-pied far back into ancient times. Inves-tigating and recording the layers, orstrata, in such a location is criticallyimportant to archaeology, for it pro-vides the only way of studying changesin human societies through time. Strati-graphic observation, as the method iscalled, starts with the proven assump-tion that the earliest occupation was atthe bottom. This was largely a newapproach in the area. Up until then,most Southwestern excavation hadbeen little concerned with recordingdifferent periods of occupation, butmore with clearing ruins and recover-ing fragile artifacts such as baskets andbeautifully decorated Pueblo pots.

In 1914, archaeologist Nels Nelsonhad dug into San Cristobal Pueblo,New Mexico, in 1-foot (3 meter)depths in various layers, from whichhe recovered different pottery types.But it was left to Kidder to explainwhat these differences meant. Werethey reliable indi-cators of changingPueblo culture, or merely shifts in pot-making fashions? The answer couldonly come from more investigation.

Kidder excavated into the deeplayers of Pecos on a massive scale. Dur-ing the early seasons he refined Nel-son's San Cristobal approach by aban-doning arbitrary levels and makingdetailed sketches of the way the refusediscarded by the inhabitants had accu-mulated. He traced the natural strataof the middens—buried heaps of dis-carded bones, broken utensils, andthe like—and carefully recorded thepot fragments found in them. Kidder

AlfredVincentKidderBORNOctober 29, 1885Marquette, Michigan

DIED

June 11, 1963Cambridge, Massachusetts

EDUCATION

Harvard University (A.B. 1908;Ph.D. 1914)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Developed first stratigraphic cul-tural sequence for southwesternUnited States, using a multidiscipli-nary approach there for the firsttime; as Director of Carnegie Insti-tution's Division of HistoricalResearch, introduced multidiscipli-nary approach to and supervisedMaya research. Wrote An Introduc-tion to the Study of SouthwesternArchaeology (1924), a classic onthe subject.

A L F R E D V I N C E N T K I D D E R 1 03.

"The Southwest owesto outside sources littlemore than the germs of itsculture. Its developmentfrom these germs has beena local and almost whollyan independent one"

—Alfred Vincent Kidder,An Introduction to theStudy of SouthwesternArchaeology (1924)

followed the example of Reisner's workin Egypt and used pegs and strings tomark off each specific areas. Horizontaland vertical measurements made fromthe strings recorded the location ofevery element in three dimensions.This made it possible to map the preciserise and fall of even the smallest ashlayers. His potsherd catalogs were alsomodeled on those used by Reisner alongthe Nile to develop a meticulous analy-sis of the profound changes in potteryforms and, above all, surface decorationover many centuries. For example, Kid-der found that the first occupants ofthe pueblo made a distinctive black-on-white style of pottery. He also recov-ered hundreds of human skeletons.

While waiting for induction intothe army in 1917, Kidder visited mod-ern-day Hopi and other pueblos in theSouthwest and acquired a knowledgeboth of Southwestern ethnographyand of modern Pueblo culture. In allhis subsequent researches he meldedanthropology and archaeology, thestudy of both the living culture and theancient, into definitive summaries ofancient Pueblo society.

After Kidder's military service,Excavations at Pecos resumed in 1920and produced the discovery of stillmore human burials. Kidder calledon the expert services of biologicalanthropologist Ernest Albert Hooton.He insisted that Hooton visit the exca-vations so he could study the humanremains as they emerged in thetrenches and witness the actual fieldconditions of their discovery. This wasone of the first cases where a skeletalexpert worked in the field alongside aNorth American archaeologist. SoonKidder had data on the sex and age ofthe skeletons, as well as some interest-ing information on life expectancy andancient pathology. Hooton showed, forexample, that most of the Pecos peopledied in their 20s.

By 1922 Kidder had turned hisattention to the architecture andexpansion of the pueblo, and excavatedsome of the earliest occupation levels.After that, he virtually ceased excava-tion there to turn his attention to ana-lyzing his many finds, and to surveyingand digging other sites in the neigh-borhood of Pecos. He extended hisapproach of combined archaeologyand anthropology to include studiesof modern-day agriculture, humanremains, even public health.

By 1927 his stratigraphic excava-tions and pottery studies from Pecoshad produced a great amount of evi-dence and data. He was confidentenough of his understanding andinterpretation of this information todevelop a detailed sequence of ancientPueblo and pre-Pueblo cultures for theSouthwest. Kidder's sequence beganwith Basket Maker cultures, at least2,000 years old, which eventuallyevolved into the Pueblo societies oflater periods. At the same time, hefounded an annual Pecos Conference,where he and his colleagues gatheredto report on their latest researches andto discuss problems of common con-cern. The Pecos Conference is stillan annual event today.

The Pecos excavations establishedKidder as a superlative fieldworker. Thedig trained a generation of studentswho later used Kidder's methods inthe field on their own digs throughoutthe Southwest. These accomplish-ments established Kidder as one of thefounders of modern North Americanarchaeology. But that was not all.

The second half of Kidder's archae-ological career took him to CentralAmerica. In 1929 he became directorof the Carnegie Institution's Divisionof Historical Research. The Carnegieserved as a national research institute.Its main interests were in the physicalsciences, but it poured considerable


sums into archaeology and the socialsciences in the 1930s and 1940s.Although Kidder spent most of histime on administration, he supervisedfield projects, most of which followedhis multidisciplinary approach per-fected at Pecos. He called a meetingof all archaeologists supported byCarnegie at the Maya city of ChichenItza in 1930, to share new ideas aboutMaya archaeology. Kidder felt that toomany archaeologists just dug in their"own little patches" without taking anyaccount of what other scientists likebotanists or historians were doing. Hepersuaded aviator Charles Lindbergh tojoin forces with him in an aerial sur-vey of the Yucatan Peninsula, whichresulted in the discovery of many newlocations. He employed his friend Syl-vanus Morley to continue his ground-breaking work on Maya inscriptions.Anthropologist Robert Redfield studiedmodern Maya communities withCarnegie support.

Kidder retired in 1950, but he stillexercised great influence on Mayaarchaeology. By 1953 he was insistingthat environmental research was all-important. He posed fundamental ques-tions: How had the Maya modifiedtheir rainforest environment? Whateffects had environmental change hadon the development of their civiliza-tion? But now the Carnegie Institutionwas placing more and more emphasison the physical sciences as a result ofWorld War II. Funds for archaeologyshrank sharply. Kidder retired from theinstitution in 1950. The Division ofHistorical Research was abolished in1958. Meanwhile, Kidder retired toCambridge, Massachusetts, where hishome became a gathering place forboth fellow archaeologists and studentsuntil his death in 1963.

Alfred Kidder established many ofthe basic principles of North Americanarchaeology. The artifact classification

systems he developed at Pecos arrangedpotsherds by such categories as methodof manufacture, decoration, and form,in much the same kind of taxonomythat Carl Linnaeus used for plants. Asboth fieldworker and archaeologicaladministrator, Kidder had few peers inthe 20th century.

FURTHER READING

Givens, Douglas R. Alfred Vincent Kidderand the Development of Americanist Archae-ology. Albuquerque: University of NewMexico Press, 1992.

Woodbury, Richard B. Alfred V. Kidder.New York: Columbia University Press,1973.

This illustration from Kidder's Pecosreport shows painted Pueblo vessels. Hewas able to determine the sequence ofthe pottery after years of excavation, andhe demonstrated a change from vesselswith black designs painted on white back-grounds to pots with painted glazes ontheir surfaces.

A L F R E D V I N C E N T K I D D E R • 105

OscarMontelius

M A S T E R ART IFACTC L A S S I F I E R

Oscar Montelius was a world authority on the prehistoricartifacts of Europe. He used changes in such artifacts asBronze Age brooches and swords to trace chronologicallinks from one side of the continent to the other

ew archaeologists become Royal Antiquaries,but Oscar Montelius did. He was appointed tothat post in the court of Sweden in honor ofhis life's work, which had made him one of themost influential European archaeologists of

the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was not an exca-vator, but a kind of classifying detective who developed animpressive amount of new information from studying themost prosaic of prehistoric artifacts—the bronze brooch,dagger, pin, and sword, for example.

Montelius was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and devel-oped an interest in ancient history during childhood. Afterobtaining a doctorate in archaeology at the University ofUppsala in 1867, he went on a series of study tours acrossEurope, examining stone, bronze, and iron artifacts fromdozens of archaeological sites. Montelius was deeply influ-enced by the evolutionary teachings of Charles Darwin. Healso built on the careful excavations of his intellectual pre-decessor, Danish archaeologist J. J. A. Worsaae, who hadproved the chronological validity of the Stone, Bronze, andIron ages. Montelius soon became an expert on prehistoricartifacts of every kind, especially bronze brooches, bowls,and swords. In 1873 he published a pioneering study of theseartifacts from northern and central Sweden, using evolvingseries of artifacts to distinguish between an early and a lateBronze Age in the region.

Montelius published this research as numerous newexcavations throughout Europe produced hundreds of newartifacts. Although attached to the State Historical Museum,he spent much of each year traveling away from Stockholm,visiting museums and newly excavated sites, combing allparts of Europe for new material. He produced a series ofbrilliant and highly detailed technical reports, culminatingin his Brooches from the Bronze Age (1881), an artifact studythat drew on finds not only from Scandinavia, but also frommuch richer collections from Greece and Italy.

Montelius followed this important work with On theDating of the Bronze Age, particularly in relation to Scandinavia(1885). This closely argued archaeological masterpiecerefused to take nationalistic perspectives, which were char-acteristic of European archaeology at the time. Instead, hefocused on the artifacts themselves, in an innovative use ofartifact classification that was to dominate European archae-ology for more than half a century. "I have given individualconsideration to each of the main series of weapons, tools,ornaments, and pottery, together with their ornamentation,so as to determine the course of their evolution, and to findout in what order the types . . . succeed one another," hewrote at the end of his career in 1903.


F

"Almost all the finds of past centuries have disappearedwithout a trace . . . We can readily imagine the importanceof these facts if we imagine that an antiquarian somethousand or two thousand years hence should attempt torepresent our own manner of l i f e , and yet had scarcelyany other material for the purpose beyond the verdigrisedand rusty remains of our metal works."

—Oscar Montelius, The Civilisation of Sweden inHeathen Times (1888)

Oscar Montelius was a genius at akind of typology—artifact classifica-tion—that involved tracing minutedetails of Bronze Age artifacts from oneend of Europe to the other. He focusedon the shapes of sword blades, forexample: narrow ones being used tostab, while the wider ones were slash-ing weapons. In jewelry, even thesmallest details of brooches used toadorn clothing had significance inMontelius's eyes, for he assumed thatchanges in fashion and design cameslowly and over time. He was carefulto base his Bronze Age research on arti-facts found with undisturbed burials.His classifications depended on accu-rate dating, finds that had never beendisturbed by later activity, and carefulobservation of stratigraphic layers inarchaeological sites. Bronze Age burialswere ideal for his purpose, because theywere plentiful and contained a widerange of distinctive artifacts. Mon-telius's classifications traced the devel-opment of artifacts from strictly practi-cal prototypes like simple pins, thenshowed how hitherto strictly functionalfeatures like the hasp of a pin becamemore elaborate and decorative until,centuries later, a once simple BronzeAge pin had become a highly elaborateornament worn by important chieftains.

Montelius not only assumed thesimple and functional was the earliest,he set out to document it with refer-ence to other artifacts found in thesame graves. For example, Bronze Ageaxes and adzes first appeared as artifactswith low flanges that held the handle.Soon, the makers elaborated them withdeeper flanges and set them at an angleto better secure the wooden handle.Montelius followed the evolution ofa spiral design used to hold the twoprongs of the shaft set between themto prevent splitting as it fused with theaxe, then showed how it was modifiedinto a purely ornamental feature as theBronze Age axe developed a socket tohold the handle. He drew on moderncomparisons to make fundamentalpoints. A brilliant teacher, Monteliusdemonstrated how his system workedby showing how railroad coaches devel-oped from basically stagecoaches seton flanged wheels into a much moreefficient design, which, however, stillretained an outside entrance to eachcompartment, as would a series of stage-coaches fastened end to end.

By 1881 Montelius had subdividedthe European Bronze Age into six peri-ods, cross-dating the later ones by usingartifacts of known historical age inEgypt and southwestern Asia as the

OscarMonteliusBORNSeptember 9, 1843Stockholm, Sweden

DIED

November 4, 1921Stockholm, Sweden

EDUCATION

University of Uppsala (Ph.D. 1865)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Developed the first comprehensiveartifact classifications for prehistoricEurope, which linked Scandinaviawith the Mediterranean world andwork is the foundation of all laterresearch into European prehistory.Wrote Brooches from the BronzeAge (1881); On the Dating of theBronze Age, particularly in relationto Scandinavia (1885); The Civilisa-tion of Sweden in Heathen Times(English translation 1888).

O S C A R M O N T E L I U S 1 0 7

,

.

This illustration of a dolmen-style megalithic tomb in Denmark appeared in OscarMontelius's Civilizations of Sweden. A dolmen is an ancient tomb with upright stonesthat support a heavy capstone.The structure was originally covered with earth toform a burial mound.

basis for a provisional chronology. Heshowed how bronze first appeared inEgypt by the third millennium BC andin Greece with the Mycenaeans ofthe second millennium, with iron onlyappearing there in about 1000 BC. SinceBronze Age artifacts found north andsouth of the Alps resembled each otherclosely, Montelius was able to showthat the Bronze Age began in centralEurope in the mid-second millenniumBC and ended in northern Europe inthe 5th century BC.

The importance of Brooches fromthe Bronze Age cannot be overesti-mated. At one step, Oscar Monteliusplaced European prehistory on a new,scientific footing, even if his evolution-ary conclusions were controversial to

some of his colleagues, who did notbelieve that it was possible to traceminute design changes through time.From the Bronze Age he turned hisattention to the Stone Age (four peri-ods) and Iron Age (eight periods),using the same approach. His classifica-tions are still a fundamental part of thestructure of modern European archaeol-ogy more than a century later.

A scholar of exceptional percep-tion and intelligence, Montelius devel-oped his Bronze Age classificationswhile serving as a widely traveling mem-ber of the State Historical Museum. Hemade a point of cultivating close rela-tionships with staff members of lessermuseums in Denmark. His calm dispo-sition and diplomatic manners made

him friends throughout Europe andScandinavia. Montelius favored orderand peaceful cooperation. His abilitieswere recognized by his appointment tothe honorific post of Royal Antiquaryin 1907 at the age of 64.

Montelius was always surroun-ded by a lively group of students andenjoyed good working relationshipswith several important colleagues,among them his Danish counterpartSophus Muller, an archaeologist andprominent official of the NationalMuseum who spent his entire careerworking on the rich collections in thatinstitution. Like Montelius, Muller wasan artifact expert. The two men wouldstand in a museum laboratory for hoursarguing amiably about the fine detailsof the Bronze Age brooch, and rarelyagree with one another. But in the endMuller accepted Montelius's classifica-tion of the Bronze Age and addedmany details to his scheme.

Artifact classification is not themost glamorous part of archaeology,but it remains the foundation of thescience. Oscar Montelius's brilliantclassifications of prehistoric Europeanartifacts placed both Scandinavianarchaeology and the prehistory ofEurope on a scientific footing for thefirst time. All subsequent researchinto ancient Europe still depends onhis pioneering work.

FURTHER READING

Astrom, Paul, ed. Oscar Montelius, 150Years. Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell,1995.

Klindt-Jensen, Ole. A History of Scandina-vian Archaeology. London: Thames andHudson, 1975.


SylvanusGriswoldMorley

E X A M I N E R OFANCIENT MAYA

ylvanus Morley was one of the first archaeolo-gists to make systematic copies of Maya glyphs(picture-writing symbols) and to interpret them.He was also untiring in his efforts to bring theachievements of Maya civilization to a wide

public audience.Sylvanus Griswold Morley, known to his many friends

as "Van," was born in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1883. Hisfather, Benjamin, was an engineer who became vice presi-dent of the Pennsylvania Military Academy. His mothertaught languages at the same institution until 1894, whenthe family moved west to Romley, Colorado, where Ben-jamin Morley became a partner in a successful gold mine.

The young Morley became interested in archaeologyat the age of 15 as a result of reading popular books aboutancient Mexico. Before he graduated from high school,Morley had already decided he wanted to become anarchaeologist. He corresponded with Frederick Ward Put-nam, the director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeologyand Ethnology at Harvard University. Putnam recom-mended that he read H. H. Bancroft's The Native Races, themost up-to-date summary of American archaeology at thetime. His father saw no future in archaeology and enrolledhis son in the Pennsylvania Military Academy in 1903,intending that he become a civil engineer. Dutifully, Syl-vanus completed his degree and graduated in 1904, just afterhis father's death. His engineering training taught him fieldsurvey methods, which were to prove invaluable in later life.

With his father no longer looking over his shoulder,Morley now enrolled at Harvard to study anthropology,his studies paid for by a wealthy aunt. At first, Egyptologyattracted him, but his mentor, Frederick Putnam, turnedMorley's attention to Central America. He paid his firstvisit to the Yucatan Peninsula in 1904 and was captivated.Another Harvard archaeologist, Alfred Marsten Tozzer, nar-rowed his focus to the Maya. This resulted in a chance tostudy linguistics in the Yucatan under the auspices of theArchaeological Institute of America. His travels broughthim to the Maya city at Chichen Itza, where archaeologistEdward Thompson was dredging the Sacred Cenote, a deeppool, in a search for sacrificial offerings. Morley spent sometime watching Thompson at work in the murky depths ofthe Cenote and pored over his collections of pottery andsacrificial objects, such as figurines, from the pool. Theexperience changed his life. He soon abandoned pure lin-guistics as a scholarly subject and became an archaeologistwith a particular interest in the still-undeciphered Mayasystem of symbol-writing.

S Y L V A N U S G R I S W O L D M O R L E Y • 1 0 9

s

Sylvanus Morley explores Maya countryin 1915, accompanied by two localguides. Fieldwork in the Maya rainforestwas never easy, and Morley hated itmuch of the time. He once said: "Any-one who says he likes the bush is eithera ... fool or a ... liar"

Back at Harvard, Morley tookMaya archaeology courses from Tozzer.He began to delve into the fascinatingmysteries of Maya writing, which wasto become his specialty. Morley alsoworked with Alfred Kidder in theSouthwest as part of New Mexicoarchaeologist Edgar Hewitt's "fieldschool," forging a lifelong friendshipand learning field methods at the sametime. His expertise as a surveyor andhis cheerful manner made a long sum-mer's work in effectively unmappedcountry a good deal easier.

Morley had no profound interestin the Southwest, but he continuedto work for Hewitt at the School ofAmerican Archaeology until 1915. Heowed much to Hewitt's rugged commonsense and tough approach to fieldwork,which shrugged off hardships andbelieved in leaving students alone inthe field to learn for themselves.

Sylvanus Morley was appointed toa research position in Maya archaeology

at the Carnegie Institution of Washing-ton D.C. in 1915, largely on the basisof his enthusiastic proposal for fieldresearch. This was the job of hisdreams, one that allowed him to spend10 years surveying some of the mostinaccessible parts of the Maya home-land. He traveled by mule and on footunder the most trying conditions. Fliesand ticks besieged him everywhere.Morley hated the discomfort of field-work, but he persisted because he wasdetermined to acquire the basic data onMaya symbols to permit deciphermentof their ancient writing. "Anyone whosays he likes the bush is either a ...fool or a ... liar," he would remarkwhen anyone extolled the romanceof fieldwork.

The 1916 expedition was a typicalMorley field trip. Plagued with recur-ring bouts of malaria, he took a doctorwith him as he traveled from NewOrleans to Guatemala, visiting suchmajor sites as the ancient Maya city of


Copan. The only people who knew theforest well were the native chicleros,men who tapped chicozapote trees tocollect the raw material for chewinggum. Morley offered them a reward of$25 in gold for every unknown ruinwith inscriptions reported to him. Arich bounty of sites resulted, amongthem the large city of Uaxactun, a day'swalk north of the great Maya metropo-lis at Tikal. Returning from Uaxactun,Morley's party was mistaken for a partyof revolutionaries and ambushed bygovernment soldiers. The doctor andMorley's guide were killed. Morley him-self would have been killed had he notdismounted a few moments earlier torecover his glasses, which had beenripped off by a liana vine. The sur-vivors hid in the bush for hours untilthe troops moved on.

During the later years of WorldWar I, Morley worked for U.S. NavalIntelligence under the disguise of atraveling scientist in Central America,until being posted to the Naval CoastDefense Reserve in Washington D.C.When the war ended, he resumedCarnegie Institution field seasons,mostly in the Peten region of thesouthern Yucatan. The Carnegie postwas ideal for him, for it involved noteaching responsibilities and suppliedabundant funds and plenty of help fromgraphic artists and other technicians.He copied inscriptions from site aftersite, publishing a steady stream ofimportant reports on the still undeci-phered Maya writing. The Inscriptionsof Copan appeared in 1925—643 pages,with 33 photographs and 91 drawings.This was one of the first systematicrecords of the Maya symbols ever made,and an important basis for futureresearch. The people of Copan madehim an honorary citizen of the town forhis work, and he received a honorary

doctorate from his alma mater, thePennsylvania Military Academy. Publi-cation in 1937 and 1938 of his five-volume work The Inscriptions of Peten,with its 2,065 pages, 187 plates, and 39maps, added to his already illustriousreputation. The Guatemalan govern-ment honored him with the Order ofthe Quetzal.

By this time, Morley was increas-ingly obsessed with understanding theMaya calendar and writing system, andwith the importance of telling the pub-lic about the great achievements ofMaya civilization. The Maya calendarwas based on secular and religioussequences of days that interlocked in akind of giant gear wheel, the sequencesrepeating themselves every 52 years.This cyclical calendar was combinedwith a "Long Count," a linear sequenceof years that extended far into theremote past.

Morley's ultimate ambition wasto study the Maya of Chichen Itza" inthe northern Yucatan, but he neverachieved his wish. As director of allCarnegie archaeological work in theregion, he was in charge of excavationsat Chichen Itza, but had no interest inadministering the fieldwork or dealingwith budgets. Instead of excavating toestablish the history of the city, hedevoted most resources to reconstruct-ing temples and other structures fortourists. Morley himself spent a greatdeal of time seeking out inscriptionsfrom as many Maya sites as possible.His friend Alfred Kidder took over thedirectorship he had held for manyyears. Morley was quietly shunted toone side. His narrowly focused researchwas considered old-fashioned in anera when Kidder and others were look-ing at the Maya from much broaderperspectives rather than focusing onlyon inscriptions.

SylvanusGriswoldMorleyBORN

June 7, 1883Chester, Pennsylvania

DIED

September 2, 1948Santa Fe, New Mexico

EDUCATION

Pennsylvania Military Academy(graduated 1904)Harvard College (A.B. 1908)

ACHIEVEMENTS

Developed the first comprehensivesurveys of Maya sites in the YucatanPeninsula; carried out fundamentalresearch on the Maya calendar; wasa major spokesperson about ancientMaya achievements. Wrote TheInscriptions of Copan (1925); TheInscriptions of Peten (1937-38); TheAncient Maya (1946).

S Y L V A N U S G R I S W O L D M O R L E Y • 1 1 1

"We may safely acclaim the ancient Maya, without fearof successful contradiction, as the most brilliant aboriginalpeople on the planet."

—Sylvanus Griswold Morley, The Ancient Maya (1946)

Sylvanus Morley continued towork on Maya glyphs until his retire-ment from the Carnegie's Division ofHistorical Research in 1947. He thenreturned to the Southwest. After a yearas director of the Museum of NewMexico in Santa Fe, he died in 1948.

Morley was a gregarious, charm-ing man who spent a lifetime as theancient Maya's spokesman to the out-side world. Unfortunately, he had anobsession with the Maya calendar, sohis copies of inscriptions and his writ-ings are concerned almost entirely withdates. He wrestled with details of thecelebrated Maya Long Count linearcalendar and cyclical time scale ininscriptions to the exclusion of virtuallyevery other kind of archaeologicalinformation. One can hardly blamehim, for his work reflected the abidinginterests of Maya specialists at the time,who believed the Maya were peacefulpriests, obsessed with astronomy andthe measurement of time using theheavenly bodies. He and his contempo-raries never produced a comprehensivepublication of Maya inscriptions thatwould be of value today. They venturedno further than the calendars. Nor wereMorley's copies good enough for seriousscholarship. They were nothing besidethe brilliant photographs taken by his

immediate predecessor Alfred Maudslaywith an immense glass-plate camera inthe 1880s.

Morley's greatness came from hisunending enthusiasm and his passionfor Maya civilization. He introducednumerous young scholars to the excite-ments of Central American researchand helped make the ancient Maya ahousehold word. Today, Maya archaeol-ogy is highly specialized and the glyphshave been deciphered, in one of thegreat scientific achievements of the20th century. But today's great andcontinuing advances in our knowledgeof the Maya would not be possiblewithout the devoted, often solitarywork of Sylvanus Morley.

FURTHER READING

Brunhouse, Robert L. Sylvanus G. Morleyand the World of the Ancient Maya. Nor-man: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971.

Coe, Michael. Breaking the Maya Code.London: Thames and Hudson, 1992.


Aurel Stein

C E N T R A L A S I A NT R A V E L E R

xplorer, Asian traveler, and archaeologist,Aurel Stein was one of the last great archaeo-logical adventurers. His journeys throughremote parts of Central Asia provided theoutside world with its first scientific glimpse of

the Silk Road that once linked ancient China with the West.Aurel Stein was born into a Jewish family in Budapest,

Hungary, in 1862. Nathan and Anna Hirschler Stein facedintense persecution, so they baptized their son a Protestant tomake it possible for him to attend a prestigious school. Whenhe was 10, they sent him to the highly regarded Kreuzschulein Dresden, Germany. Young Aurel soon showed considerableintellectual talents, but also went through Hungarian militarytraining, which gave him valuable surveying skills and an eyefor landscape, essential qualifications for an archaeologist. Hereceived his doctorate in linguistics from the University ofTubingen, Germany, in 1883, then carried out two years of

Aurel Stein used his education in Asian languages to travelthrough little-known parts of Asia and do extensive research. Inhis research, Stein often used methods that today would be con-sidered looting or piracy, but he managed to preserve hundredsof priceless artifacts of ancient Asian culture.

E

A U R E L S T E I N • 1 1 3

When Aurel Stein found the temples andfacades of the Cave of the Thousand Bud-dhas in 1907, they were crumbling andsuccumbing to the ravages of time.

post-doctoral research in Asian lan-guages and archaeology at Oxford Uni-versity in England.

Stein's strong language qualifica-tions and surveying expertise ensuredhim a civil service career with theIndian Educational Service, beginningin 1887. He became Principal of theOriental College in Lahore, India, buttransferred to the Indian Archaeologi-cal Survey in 1910. By this time he had

already acquired a reputation as atraveler. In 1900 and 1901, he hadexplored remote country on the Chi-nese and Indian borders, where hemade a study of the still little-knownKhotan Empire, an early center forthe spread of Buddhism from India toChina. Khotan fell to the Arabs in the8th century AD and grew rich on SilkRoad caravan trade between Chinaand the West. Stein's primary objectivewas to examine the trade in artifactsand sacred books that were being soldto European collectors at the time.He was among the first Europeans toventure into Khotan country, so hiscollections and first two books, Chron-icle of Kings of Kashmir (1900) andAncient Khotan (1907), aroused con-siderable interest.

Aurel Stein traveled deep intoCentral Asia on a second long journeyfrom 1906 to 1913, probably his bestknown expedition, into the least acces-sible parts of China. It was on this tripthat he visited the Caves of a Thou-sand Buddhas, carved into sandstone atDunhuang, in extreme western China."I noticed at once that fresco paintingscovered the walls of all the grottoes. . .The 'Caves of the Thousand Buddhas'were indeed tenanted not by Buddhistrecluses, however holy, but by imagesof the Enlightened One himself," hewrote in The Ruins of Desert Cathay(1912). Almost all the shrines con-tained a huge seated Buddha, withdivine attendants.

Chinese monks had founded theearliest shrine in these caves in AD 366,forming important communities in theregion, which was an important cross-roads for the Silk Road. The 492 caveshere contain elaborate Buddhist art-works of every kind. Stein had heardrumors of a cache of ancient manu-scripts. He made discreet inquiries and


was able to see a scroll—a "beautifullypreserved roll of paper, about a foothigh and perhaps 15 yards long"—covered with undecipherable charac-ters. Stein bought this priceless manu-script for a small piece of silver. Someweeks later he witnessed a great festivalat the shrine attended by thousands ofpilgrims. He learned that a monk haddiscovered a hidden deposit of ancientmanuscripts about two years earlierwhile restoring one of the shrines. Awalled-off chamber contained "a solidmass of manuscript bundles rising to ahigh of nearly 10 feet," undisturbedfor almost a thousand years.

In a neighboring room, Steinunrolled manuscripts and paintings onsilk and linen, many of them designedto be hung in shrines. The manuscripts,which were Chinese versions of Bud-dhist texts, had been compiled in thethird and fourth centuries AD. Withinfinite care, Stein examined the entirecollection and bought seven cases ofpriceless manuscripts and more than300 paintings for four horseshoes ofsilver. He discreetly packed them andcarried them away on his camels andponies. They now are in the BritishMuseum. While his methods are con-demned as unethical robbery today, itis an open question whether the manu-scripts would have survived for poster-ity had Stein not passed them intoexpert hands.

By the time he returned to India,Stein had acquired an internationalreputation for his archaeological dis-coveries and manuscript finds. TheIndian Archaeological Service contin-ued funding of his journeys, whichthe Indian government saw both asa way of acquiring vital geographicaland political information, and of col-lecting priceless artifacts for thenational collections.

In 1913 to 1916, Stein left on athird expedition, outside India. Thistime he faced keen competition fromFrench, German, and Russian archaeol-ogists, who were attracted to CentralAsia by his previous remarkable discov-eries. He penetrated deep into Mongo-lia and traced unknown parts of theSilk Road, acquiring artifacts at everyturn. Word of his activities had spreadto local officials, who were now moresuspicious and harder to deal with.Nevertheless, Stein returned withmany unique manuscripts and magnifi-cent jade ornaments and fine pottery.Never an excavator, he preferred topurchase articles for as low a priceas possible, or to collect them fromdeserted archaeological sites.

During the 1920s, Stein becameinterested in the Harappan civilization,centered on the Indus River in whatis now Pakistan, which dated to about2000 BC. He followed excavationsat the sites of the ancient cities ofHarappa and Mohenjo-daro with greatinterest, realizing that these ancienttrading centers might have links toMesopotamia and the Mediterraneanworld far to the west. He set out onnumerous small-scale expeditions intothe wilds of Persia and Iraq, searchingfor these links, following a punishingroutine, despite being in his 60s. Hewrote: "I am hard at work daily from7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., pushing on aswell as my poor pen, and my inveterateclaim at critical soundness, permit theaccount o f . . . my expedition."

During the remainder of his career,Stein undertook many difficult tours ofcentral Asian lands, partly on intelli-gence missions and also on archaeolog-ical ones. In 1932 he found the site ofGendrosia in Persia, a stop on Alexan-der the Great's expedition to India in332 BC. As late as the 1940s, when he

Aurel SteinBORN

November 26, 1862Budapest, Hungary

DIED

October 25, 1943Kabul, Afganistan

EDUCATION

University of Tubingen (Ph.D.1883), Oxford University(post-doctoral study)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

One of the first Western expertson the archaeology and ancientsocieties of Central Asia and theSilk Road, his books are importantsources on still little-known partsof Central Asia. Wrote Sand-buriedRuins of Khotan (1903); The Ruinsof Desert Cathay (1912); InnermostAsia: Detailed Report of Explorationsin Central Asia, Ken-su, and EasternIran (1928).

A U R E L S T E I N • 1 1 5

"The recollection of this fascinating site will ever suggestthe bracing air and the unsullied peace and purity of thewintry desert."

—Aurel Stein, Sand-buried Ruins of Khotan (1903)

was in his 70s, Stein was mapping theinaccessible eastern frontiers of theRoman Empire in modem-day Iran,where he found Babylonian artifactsthat linked the region to early Meso-potamian civilization.

Aurel Stein spent much of his lateryears writing three classic works abouthis archaeological travels. On CentralAsian Tracks (1933), ArchaeologicalReconnaissances in Southeast Iran(1937), and On Old Routes of WesternIran (1940) offer insights into the diffi-culties of his remote travels, as well asdescribing key archaeological discov-eries which linked largely forgottenancient civilizations that had oncetraded with one another. Almost single-handed, and in the face of intense rival-ries from archaeologists of other nations,Stein amassed huge collections andpriceless information about an archaeo-logical wilderness where East had metWest. He was knighted for his servicesto scholarship and the British Museum.

By today's standards Stein's lootingactivities and associations with treasurehunters and tomb robbers are ethicallyindefensible and his reputation is dis-credited, especially in China. His greatcontribution was to link the ancientEast and West. His contemporary, SirLeonard Woolley, who himself dug the

biblical city of Ur in Iraq under toughconditions, remarked once that Steinperformed "the most daring and adven-turous raid on the ancient world thatany archaeologist has attempted."There is much truth in this remark.Stein's methods were questionable, buthe opened the eyes of the scholarlyworld to a huge cultural and archaeo-logical blank on the world map.

Tough, oblivious to harsh condi-tions on the road, and obsessed withtravel and archaeology, Aurel Steinremained active until the end of hislong life. He died of a stomach condi-tion in Kabul on October 25, 1943,at the height of World War II. Today,many of his achievements are forgot-ten, his findings superseded. But therough-and-ready Aurel Stein, with hisarchaeologist's instinct for landscapeand past history, opened up a newarchaeological frontier.

FURTHER READING

Mirsky, Jeanette. Sir Aurel Stein: Archaeo-logical Explorer. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1977.

Stefoff, Rebecca. Accidental Explorers. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1992.


LeonardWoolley

EXCAVATOR OFB I B L I C A L UR

t first glance, Leonard Woolley did not standout from the crowd. An anonymous archae-ological contemporary wrote: "He was a manof slight stature and no commanding appear-ance. But presence, yes!—and even a blind

man would have known what manner of man he was." Thischarisma enabled Woolley to excavate the biblical city of Urin southern Iraq with only a handful of European assistantssupervising several hundred Arab workers. In the process, hefound one of the most spectacular royal cemeteries known toarchaeology, and claimed he had discovered evidence forNoah's flood in Genesis.

Charles Leonard Woolley was born in London in 1880.The son of a parson, he became an archaeologist by acci-dent. He entered New College, Oxford, in 1901 with thevague notion of becoming a clergyman or a schoolmaster.One spring day in 1904 he was summoned by the warden

Leonard Woolley and his workers dig out stone tablets at the biblical city of Ur.This 12-year excavation took climaxed with theuncovering of the Royal Cementary, a sensational find rivaled only by those of KingTutankhamun's tomb.

L E O N A R D W O O L L E Y •117

A

. ;

"The whole thing [firingrifle volleys when importantdiscoveries were made] mayseem childish, but in fact it issuch things that make the workgo well, and when diggingat jerablus [Carchemish]ceases to be a great gameand becomes as in Egypt,a mere business, it will bea bad thing."

—Leonard Woolley, DeadCities and Living Men (1954)

(president) of the college, who inquiredas to his career plans. Woolley men-tioned that he thought of becominga schoolmaster. "Quite so," replied thewarden. "I have decided that you shallbe an archaeologist," in a memorablequote recorded in Woolley's memoirs.One did not argue with the warden, soWoolley became an archaeologist andnever regretted it.

In 1905 he was appointed assistantkeeper of the Ashmolean Museum atOxford, under the directorship of SirArthur Evans, who had just discov-ered the Palace of Minos at Knossoson Crete. Evans was never in Oxfordhimself, and soon had Woolley outin the field. After a brief experiencedigging on a badly run excavation onHadrian's Wall in northern England,Woolley spent five years in the Sudan,working with the Eckley B. CoxeExpedition. Between 1907 and 1911Woolley worked on sites of the mysteri-ous Meroitic civilization, a Sudanesestate that flourished at about the timeof Christ.

For the most part he dug unspec-tacular cemeteries, which taught himabout excavating burial sites and theircontents—clearing them in place, pho-tographing them, then lifting the bonesand artifacts with the body. This expe-rience stood him in good stead laterin his career. The unexciting discover-ies were more than compensated forby the fascinating people he met onthe digs. Some were trained Egyptianworkers who had worked on manyexcavations. Others were less skilledSudanis, from whom he learned theart of handling laborers from other cul-tures. At the time, the Nile Valley wasa magnificent training ground for ayoung archaeologist.

As the expedition drew to a close,Woolley was offered a new opportunity

as director of the British Museum exca-vations at the ancient city of Carchem-ish on the Euphrates River. Carchemishhad guarded a strategic river crossingduring the time of the Hittites, about1500 BC, was sacked by the Assyriansin 717 BC, and later was an importantRoman outpost. The museum had dugthere sporadically since 1878, but Wool-ley directed the major effort, assistedby a young archaeologist named T. E.Lawrence, later to achieve fame asLawrence of Arabia.

The Carchemish excavationslasted until the outbreak of war in1914. Woolley and Lawrence got alongwell and lived in a high style in a spe-cially constructed mud-brick house.From the beginning, Woolley took afirm hand with local officials and withhis workers, who adored him. When alocal official refused to issue an excava-tion permit, Woolley drew a revolverand held it against the official's headuntil he signed. He could get away withit, for British power and prestige in thearea was at its height.

The work at Carchemish beganwith the removal of much of the oldRoman city. Woolley was able to dis-pose of the stone to German engineerswho were building a railroad line toBaghdad nearby. At the same time, heand Lawrence quietly spied on Germanactivities for the Foreign Office. Oncethe lower, Hittite, levels of the sitewere exposed, Woolley divided hisworkers into teams of pickmen, sup-ported by shovelers and basketmen, amethod he used at all his excavationsover the next 50 years. There wasnothing new in this approach; it hadbeen established practice since AustenHenry Layard's excavations at Nineveha century earlier.

But Woolley introduced one newwrinkle: Important finds were rewarded


with a cash payment and a volley ofrifle fire. It was a silly practice to theoutside observer, perhaps, but Woolleyknew that his men prized this noisysymbol of success. He worked closelywith his assistant Sheikh Hamoudi, aman who admitted to two passions inhis life: archaeology and violence.

Carchemish was the final stage inWoolley's apprenticeship, which wasstrenuous; he could never relax becauseof the volatile nature of the localtribes, who were constantly fighting.The archaeologists carried firearmsfor protection. Woolley found that thebest strategy was to behave like the sur-rounding desert chieftains, so that hewas treated as one of their equals. As aresult, he was trusted on all sides, anduncovered a magnificent Hittite city atthe same time.

Woolley served as an intelligenceoffice during World War I and spenttwo years as a Turkish prisoner of war.He returned briefly to Carchemishwhen peace returned, but was soonappointed director of an ambitiousjoint British Museum and Universityof Pennsylvania Expedition to excavatethe biblical city of Ur. By this time heenjoyed a formidable reputation forgetting things done. For 12 seasons,from 1922 to 1934, Woolley uncoveredthe Sumerian city of Ur with a fero-cious energy that exhausted thosearound him.

He was an exacting taskmasterwho ran the excavations with thesmallest of European staffs, relyingheavily on Sheikh Hamoudi and histhree sons to handle the laborers. Theexcavations began every day at dawnand, for the European staff, rarelyended before midnight. Among thosewho worked at Ur was a young archae-ologist named Max Mallowan, whomarried a visitor he met at the dig, the

detective story writer Agatha Christie.She drew on her Ur experiences towrite Murder in Mesopotamia. Woolleywould work until two or three in themorning, then be at the excavation atdawn. He was the ideal archaeologistfor the job, capable of unraveling layersof long-abandoned buildings from jum-bles of mud brick with uncanny skill.He could dissect a temple or recoverthe remains of a fragile wooden harpin the ground with equal skill. He alsohad a genius for knowing when to wait.One of his 1922 trial trenches uncov-ered gold objects, perhaps from a royalcemetery. Woolley waited four years togain the experience to excavate it fully.He wrote: "Our object was to get his-tory, not to fill museum cases with mis-cellaneous curiosities."

To Woolley, Ur was not a deadcity, but a crowded settlement withbusy streets. His huge excavationsuncovered entire urban precincts. Hewould rejoice in taking visitors fromhouse to mud-brick house, identifyingtheir owners from cuneiform tabletsfound inside. The excavations revealedthe architecture of the great ziggurat,a stepped-wall pyramid temple at Ur,and probed the depths of the citymound to the earliest settlement ofall: a tiny hamlet of reed huts. Heeven claimed to have found traces ofthe biblical flood—a thick layer of ster-ile clay covering a tiny farming villageat the base of the ancient city. Theclaim in fact originated with Woolley'swife Kathleen, a somewhat eccentricartist, whom he married in 1927. Thefind caused a great sensation at thetime, but is in fact evidence of a muchlater flood.

The climax of the Ur excavationscame in the late 1920s when Woolleyfinally exposed the Royal Cemetery,with its spectacular burial pits. The

CharlesLeonardWoolleyBORN

April 17, 1880Hackney, London

DIED


EDUCATION

New College, Oxford University(B.A. 1904)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Excavated the Hittite city of Car-chemish in Syria and biblical Ur insouthern Iraq, injecting new scien-tific rigor into Near Eastern archae-ology; introduced archaeology to anenormous general audience. WroteExcavations at Ur (1927-51; one-volume ed. 1954); Dead Cities andLiving Men (1954).

L E O N A R D W O O L L E Y • 1 1 9

This dramatic photograph of the greatFlood Pit at Ur demonstrates the pit'senormous depth; Wooley's workers indi-cate its scale.The base of the pit dates toabout 2900 to 2800 BC.

scale of the excavation is astonishing.Woolley cleared more than 2,000 com-moners' burials, and 16 royal graves,using teams of specially trained work-ers. A series of "death pits" chronicledelaborate funeral ceremonies wheredozens of courtiers dressed in theirfinest regalia took poison, then laydown in the great pit to die with theirmaster or mistress. Unfortunately,Woolley's notes are inadequate for mod-ern archaeologists to establish whetherhis vivid reconstructions were in factaccurate. But his achievement at thetime was undeniable, as it is today. King

George V of England knighted him forhis services to archaeology in 1935.

Woolley's lucid and dramaticaccounts of the royal burials and "TheFlood" made him one of the mostwidely read archaeologists of the day."At one end, on the remains of awooden bier, lay the body of the queen,a gold cup near her hand; the upperpart of the body was entirely hidden bya mass of beads of gold, silver, and lapislazuli.. . long strings of which, hang-ing from a collar, had formed a cloakreaching to the waist," he wrote in apopular book, Ur of the Chaldees, pub-lished in 1929. The spectacular findsrivaled those of Tutankhamun's tomb.

Woolley closed the Ur excavationsin 1934, in the belief that a period ofstudy and analysis was needed beforemore digging took place. He himselfwrote most of the massive 10-volumereport on the excavation, which took ahalf-century to complete. After WorldWar II he conducted excavations inSyria and elsewhere, but nothing onthe scale of his Ur campaigns, whichrank as one of the classic excavationsof history. Woolley never held an acad-emic post, but relied on modest privatefunds and earnings from his writings fora salary. He died in London in 1960.

Few archaeologists have evermatched Leonard Woolley's pace ofwork and flair for brilliant scientificdiscovery. His methods were roughand ready by modern standards, buthis achievement was prodigious andlaid the foundations for modern knowl-edge of the Sumerians, the world'searliest civilization.

FURTHER READING

Fagan, Brian M. Return to Babylon. Boston:Little, Brown, 1979.

Winstone, H. V. F. Woolley of Ur. London:Seeker and Warburg, 1990.


VereGordonChilde

THE B E G I N N I N G S OFE U R O P E A N S O C I E T Y

I

ere Gordon Childe was the most widely readarchaeologist of the 20th century. His popu-lar books on prehistoric Europe and theancient Near East influenced popular think-ing about archaeology for a half-century. His

theories about the origins of agriculture and ancient civiliza-tion argued that these major milestones resulted from greatrevolutions in human society.

Gordon Childe was born in 1892, the son of a conserva-tive Church of England minister in Sydney, Australia. Hesoon rebelled against his staid upbringing. While an under-graduate at Sydney University he became a militant liberal,with strong views on worker's rights. He held liberal, evencommunist, beliefs for the rest of his life. Childe studiedGreek, Latin, and philosophy, and graduated in 1913. Aftertwo years studying classical archaeology at Oxford Univer-sity, he returned to Australia and became actively involvedin Labour Party politics, an experience that alienated himpermanently from political life. He returned to England toresume his studies of European archaeology, supporting him-self by translating foreign archaeological books into English.

Throughout the 1920s Childe traveled widely in Europe,visiting archaeological sites and studying museum collec-tions, especially in eastern and southeast Europe, where fewBritish scholars ventured at the time. Unlike most of hisarchaeological contemporaries, Childe was a brilliant lin-guist, so he was able to converse easily with archaeologistsall over Europe, even in obscure museums in the Balkans.He also had a powerful visual memory, which enabled himto note and remember similarities among artifacts in widelyseparated locations. For example, he traced the distinctiveround-based clay vessels made by the earliest farmers on theDanube River Valley in southeastern Europe right acrossGermany and the Rhine Valley to the Netherlands and theshores of the North Sea far to the northwest. Years of arduoustraveling and library research trained Gordon Childe tobecome a master of the broad sweep of European history, oneof the few scholars with an ability to summarize obscurearchaeological data from widely separated lands into a coher-ent story.

Three books established Gordon Childe as one of theleading archaeologists of his day. The first was The Dawn ofEuropean Civilization, published in 1925. He wrote the bookas a form of narrative history, using artifacts and ancientsocieties as his subjects instead of kings, statesmen, and com-mon people. The Dawn uses what Childe called "archaeolog-ical cultures," similar assemblages of artifacts and other cul-ture traits, to trace the movements of ancient peoples across

V

V E R E G O R D O N C H I L D E • 1 2 1

Excavations at Maes How by GordonChilde in 1954. Childe is the figure in theblack suit in the middle ground. His trenchcut a cross-section across the mound, ona scale which would not be permitted ona protected site like Maes How today.Colin Renfrew reexcavated the site in1973 to obtain radiocarbon dates, a dat-ing method unavilable in 1954.

Europe. He believed that the greatchanges in the European past resultedfrom the movements of people and thespread of new ideas such as farming andmetalworking, many of them originat-ing in southwest Asia, then spreadinginto temperate Europe.

The Aryans (1926) looked at someof these population movements interms of ethnic and linguistic groupslike the celebrated Indo-Europeans, apopular but controversial approach toancient migrations of the day. His thirdbook, The Danube in Prehistory (1929),was one of the greatest of Childe's writ-ings. It presented a detailed study of avital region from where so many piv-otal ideas for ancient Europe devel-oped, among them metallurgy and agri-culture. Childe was an advocate ofculture history—the use of artifacts andchronologies to define long series ofchanging prehistoric cultures throughtime, which could be compared withothers from neighboring areas. Heturned European prehistory into an

intricate jigsaw puzzle of artifacts,human cultures, and archaeologicalsites, building on the earlier work ofOscar Montelius and others. His workstill forms the basis of what we knowabout ancient Europe today.

In 1927 Gordon Childe wasappointed the first Abercromby Pro-fessor of Prehistoric Archaeology atEdinburgh University. He was not agood teacher and had few students,so he spent most of his time travelingand writing articles and books. Between1928 and 1955 he also carried outexcavations at more than 15 sites inScotland and northern Ireland. Hismost important excavation was that ofSkara Brae, a Stone Age village on theOrkney Islands north of the mainland,where he found internal furnishingsstill intact. He interpreted the furnish-ings by the simple expedient of com-paring them to 19th-century ruraldwellings in the Scottish highlands.As a result, he was able to show whichparts of the dwellings were used to


"Archaeology's revelations . . . dispose no abstract evolutionbut the interaction of multiple concrete groups and theblending of contributions from far-sundered regions."

—Vere Gordon Childe, New Light on the Most AncientEast (1934)

house humans and which cattle, anddistinguish the hearth areas wherewomen prepared food. This was oneof the first attempts to distinguishbetween men's and women's activitiesin prehistoric houses.

Meanwhile, Childe continued towrite about wider issues of archaeology.His interests shifted from artifacts tobroad economic developments in thepast, especially agriculture and the ori-gins of urban civilization. For thesedevelopments, he looked to southwest-em Asia. In a book titled The MostAncient East (1928), he argued thatextensive droughts at the end of theIce Age caused human societies in theregion to settle in oases, where theycame in close contact with both wildgoats and sheep, and wild grasses.Within a short period of time theybegan farming and herding animals,innovations that had a profoundeffect on human history. He calledthis cultural development the Agri-cultural Revolution.

In The Bronze Age (1930), Childeturned his attention to the origins ofmetallurgy. He argued that metalwork-ing required the services of full-timespecialists, people who, like miners andprospectors, functioned independentlyof any village community or tribe.Thus, Stone Age communities becamedependent on outsiders, developedlong-distance trade routes, and losttheir ancient self-sufficiency.

These metallurgical argumentssoon proved wrong, but his New Lighton the Most Ancient East (1934) devel-oped his revolution hypothesis evenfurther. Childe argued that the Agricul-tural Revolution soon led to an UrbanRevolution, to the emergence of state-organized societies. Each revolutionproduced more-productive technolo-gies, greater food surpluses, and massivepopulation increases. He believed theyhad as much impact on human historyas the Industrial Revolution of the18th and 19th centuries AD. Fromsouthwestern Asia, these innovationsand technologies spread far and wide toEurope, Africa, and eastern Asia."From the east came light," he pro-claimed; a generation of archaeologistsand historians believed him.

In 1935 Childe visited the SovietUnion, where he toured museums andwas exposed to communist doctrines.He began writing about human culturalevolution, about the ways in whichincreasing scientific knowledge gavehumans greater control over the nat-ural environment. Later, he arguedthat social, political, and economicinstitutions played important rolesin such changes, and flirted withnotions of class struggles and otherfeatures of Marxist dogma, but withoutmuch success.

In 1946 Childe left Edinburgh tobecome a professor of European Archae-ology at the Institute of Archaeology,

Vere GordonChildeBORN

April 14, 1892North Sydney, Australia

DIED

October 19, 1957Blue Mountains, Australia

EDUCATION

University of Sydney, Australia(B.A. 1915), Oxford University(M. Phil. 1917)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Wrote pioneering summaries ofEuropean prehistory based on sites,cultures, and artifacts; tied ancientEuropean societies to importantdevelopments such as agriculture,metallurgy, and urban civilization insouthwestern Asia; influenced gen-erations of archaeologists and histo-rians with his ideas of culturechange. Wrote: The Dawn of Euro-pean Civilization (1925); The Aryans(1926); The Most Ancient East(1928); The Danube in Prehistory(1929); New Light on the MostAncient East (1934); What Happenedin History (1942); Social Evolution(1951); Piecing Together the Past(1956); The Prehistory of EuropeanSociety (1956).

V E R E G O R D O N C H I L D E • 1 2 3

In his field notes from his excavationsat Rinyo, Orkney, in 1938, Gordon Childerecords the discovery of an ancientclay oven.

London University. He remained thereuntil he retired in 1956. Giving upexcavation, he threw himself into writ-ing more theoretical works, amongthem Piecing Together the Past, a modelof clear explanation of the basic princi-ples of archaeological method that isstill of use today. He began to writeabout the ways in which environmen-tal differences produced different StoneAge farming cultures in Europe andsouthwestern Asia, but concentratedmostly on his unrivaled knowledge ofartifacts. These were the real substance

of his great syntheses of ancient Europe.The last of these was The Prehistory ofEuropean Society (1956), in which hestated that the nature of society was apowerful factor in determining ancientkinship patterns, political systems, andother forms of social relations.

By this time, Childe was thor-oughly depressed about the limitationsof archaeology, a discipline based onartifacts and material remains of thepast. He felt there was no chance ofstudying religious beliefs or other in-tangibles of the past from such finds.His depression became more intenseafter his retirement. Childe was verymuch a loner; he never married andbecame increasingly lonely in laterlife. Three months after his retirement,he returned to Australia and commit-ted suicide by jumping off a cliff in theBlue Mountains.

Childe was the most widely readarchaeologist of his day. His majorbooks were translated into numerouslanguages. His ideas on the Agricul-tural and Urban revolutions influencedgenerations of archaeologists and histo-rians. Childe never visited the UnitedStates, where his ideas were often mis-understood, especially in an era of mili-tant anti-Marxism. He himself believedthat the prehistoric cultures of south-western Asia and Europe representedthe mainstream of the human past. Forall his outmoded ideas, the great syn-theses and scholarship of Vere GordonChilde continue to exercise a powerfulinfluence on today's archaeologists.

FURTHER READING

Harris, David R. ed. The Archaeology ofV. Gordon Childe. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1994.

Trigger, Bruce G. Gordon Childe: Revolu-tions in Prehistory. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1980.

1 2 4 • A R C H A E O L O G I S T SS


Alfred Maudslay shot this photograph of a western court and tower ruins in Palengue. Maudsley's photographs, drawings, and sculp-tures were so scientifically accurate that his work became the standard for later archaeologists.

M O R E A R C H A E O L O G I S T S T O R E M E M B E R • 1 2 5

ophus Muller (1846-1934) was a Danish archae-ologist who spent his entire career in theNational Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen.Like Oscar Montelius, Muller was an expert atartifact classification. He did much to link Scan-

dinavian prehistoric cultures with those of western andcentral Europe. He developed his own classification of theEuropean Bronze Age, but later adopted Montelius's rivalscheme. Muller was also a powerful influence on scholarsstudying the Stone Age settlement of Scandinavia.

Alfred P. Maudslay (1850-1931) was a CambridgeUniversity-educated archaeologist whose imagination wasinspired by the Maya discoveries of John Lloyd Stephens. Hetraveled repeatedly to Guatemala between 1881 and 1894,recording and photographing inscriptions and buildings with

s

an accuracy was rarely exceeded untiltoday's electronic age. His eight-volume Biologia Centrali Americana,four volumes of which focus on archae-ology, is a classic of Maya archaeologyand laid the foundations for the deci-pherment of Mayan script three-quartersof a century later.

Robert Koldeway (1855-1925), aGerman scholar, was the first archaeol-ogist to master the technique of exca-vating sun-dried brick in Mesopotamia.He excavated extensively in southernIraq, notably, in 1899 through 1912, inthe ruins of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon,(which had defeated generations of dig-gers. Koldeway trained teams of skilledlocal diggers, who used picks to identifythe subtle differences between mudbrick and the surrounding soil. Thanksto these diggers, Koldeway traced Baby-lon's walls and also reconstructed themagnificent, frieze-covered Ishtar Gate.

Max Uhle (1856-1944) was a pio-neer of Peruvian archaeology. German-born and -trained, Uhle worked in Perufor more than 30 years, excavating thegreat Inca shrine at Pachacamac southof Lima on the Pacific coast and dig-ging numerous coastal cemeteries. Heis also famous for stratigraphic excava-tions in a shell midden at Emeryvillein California's San Francisco Bay area,which showed significant changes inartifacts over more than 1,000 years.

Gustaf Kossina (1858-1931)was a Central European archaeologistwith an expertise in archaeology andancient languages. He achieved notori-ety for his preoccupations with findingthe homelands of Germans and speak-ers of Indo-European languages. Hisnationalistic views were embraced bythe Nazi government in the 1930s, butwere discredited elsewhere.

Marcellin Boule (1861-1942), aFrench paleontologist and archaeolo-gist, made the issues of human evolu-tion central to Stone Age archaeology.His famous study of a Neanderthalskeleton from the La Chapelle-aux-Saints rock shelter in southwesternFrance propagated a now discreditedview that the Neanderthals were sham-bling, clumsy brutes.

George A. Reisner (1867-1942)was an American Egyptologist whospent his career at Harvard University.He made many important discoveries inEgypt and especially in Nubia (now theSudan). His excavations were muchmore thorough than those of FlindersPetrie and other contemporaries. Reis-ner's greatest discovery was the tomb ofthe Old Kingdom Queen Hetepheres(reigned about 2600 BC) at Giza inEgypt. She was the mother of thepharaoh Khufu, builder of the GreatPyramid of Giza. Reisner also unearthedcemeteries and numerous tombs inNubia, including royal burial mounds atthe ancient capital of Kerma.

Percy Newberry (1869-1949) wasan English Egyptologist who became aprofessor of Egyptology at the Univer-sity of Liverpool in 1919, then Professorof Ancient Art and History at CairoUniversity, from 1929 to 1932. He wasfamous for his researches in the tombsof provincial governors at Beni Hasanin Middle Egypt, also for a survey of theancient Egyptian tombs opposite Luxor,the so-called Theban necropolis.

Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960),one of the great pioneers of Americananthropology, made important contri-butions to archaeology. He was thefirst to use artifact-ordering methodson pottery from the American South-west. His methods were adopted by


Alfred Kidder for use at Pecos and bymany others.

Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955),paleontologist and expert on humanevolution, spent his life trying to recon-cile his Catholic faith with the findingsof science. He carried out importantwork on Stone Age sites in China andMongolia and worked closely with hisfriend Henri Breuil. His major work,The Phenomenon of Man, written in1938 to 1940 but published after hisdeath, argued that humanity is in a con-tinuous process of evolution toward aperfect spiritual state.

Manuel Gamio (1883-1960), aMexican archaeologist, was one of thefirst to carry out a stratigraphic excava-tion in the Americas. From 1917 to1922 he carried out a multidisciplinarysurvey of the city of Teotihuacln andits hinterland northeast of Mexico Citythat is still of great importance. Hislater career was devoted to anthropol-ogy and the rights of indigenous peoples.

Herbert E. Winlock (1884-1950)was a prominent Egyptologist whoworked for the Metropolitan Museumof Art, New York, for his entire career.Winlock was famous for his excava-tions, which included the discovery ofthe remains of pharaoh Tutankhamun'sfunerary feast in the Valley of Kings.He made numerous spectacular discov-eries, among them models of the house-hold of Middle Kingdom ChancellorMereketre and the bodies of a regi-ment of Middle Kingdom soldiers whohad perished during a siege. He alsoworked at the temple of New KingdomQueen Hatshepsut at Luxor and waswell known as a writer about Egyp-tian archaeology.

Albert E. Van Giffen (1884-1973) was a Dutch archaeologist whose

excavations in prehistoric burialmounds in the 1920s and 1930s pio-neered the recovery of vanishedwooden structures from sandy soils byidentifying the discoloration theycaused in the subsoil. He was also apioneer in the excavation of stratifiedoccupation mounds in swampy areas,which he preserved from peat diggersby purchasing them outright.

James A. Ford (1911-68) carriedout archaeological research in manyparts of North America, includingAlaska, but is best known for his workin the Southeast. Ford was an experton prehistoric pottery who spent muchof his career working on river valleysurvey projects. His chronologies forthe ancient Southeast were extremelyinfluential for several generations, butare now outdated.

Manuel Gamio's excavations atTeoti-huacan, Mexico in the 1920s were ofimmense importance because they werethe first scientific investigation of the greatcity.Today, the Pyramid of the Sun drawsthousands of visitors to its sacred steps.

M O R E A R C H A E O L O G I S T S T O R E M E M B E R 1 2 7

Sir Mortimer Wheeler used a grid method of horizontal excavation at Maiden Castle in England. This technique allows a researcherto uncover large areas where buildings may be found. The use of a grid allowed him to establish whether widely separated dwellingswere of the same age, by tracing stratified layers from one cross wall to another


The great archaeologists of the post-World War I period achievedmuch of their most important work between the 1930s and the1960s. They witnessed not only remarkable changes in archaeologyitself, but also staggering advances in both archaeological methods

and dramatic new discoveries. All of them, without exception, were superb field-workers. They developed new ways of excavating and used every innovative sci-entific method at their disposal. The result was the first truly global archaeology.

Some of the greatest advances came in scientific methods and archaeologi-cal excavation. The British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler and his first wifeTessa revolutionized excavation in Britain and much of Europe in the 1920s and1930s with their refinements of the Victorian methods of excavator GeneralAugustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers. They worked on late prehistoric Iron Age sitesand on Roman towns, fortifications, and ceremonial structures, training anentire generation of young archaeologists who transplanted their work to oftenremote corners of the world. Others contributed to the remarkable transforma-tion of excavation during the mid-20th century, among them another Britisharchaeologist, Stuart Piggott, and the German scholar Gerhard Bersu, who pio-neered the excavation of ground plans of prehistoric houses and entire villages.

The 30 years of the mid-20th century saw a dramatic expansion in newscientific methods applied to archaeology. These included pollen analysis, amethod for studying changes in ancient vegetation from minute fossil pollensfound in waterlogged swamps. Pollen studies allowed European archaeologistsof the 1930s to study the ways ancient societies responded to rapid climacticchange after the Ice Age as great ice sheets retreated from Scandinavia. Pollenanalysis and other climatic studies brought a new interest in changing environ-ments and human adaptations to them, an approach pioneered by GrahameClark. A Cambridge University archaeologist, Clark devoted much of his earlycareer to the study of Stone Age cultures against an environmental backdrop.His most notable excavation, from 1949 to 1951, was that of the Star Carr hunt-ing camp in northeastern England, where he was able to reconstruct the naturalenvironment surrounding the long-forgotten camp.

Gordon Willey, an American archaeologist, learned his fieldwork on thegreat river basin surveys of the 1930s, where teams of archaeologists worked in

GERTRUDE CATON-THOMPSON

DOROTHY GARROD

KATHLEEN KENYON

MORTIMER WHEELER

LOUIS ANDMARY LEAKEY

GRAHAME CLARK

JOHN DESMOND CLARK

GORDON R. WILLEY

G R E A T F I E L D W O R K E R S 1 2 9

4 GreatFieldworkers

advance of huge dam projects in the United States, recording thousands of sites. Helater became an expert on Maya civilization, and also worked in the Viru Valley incoastal Peru. Here he pioneered research into the changing patterns of human settle-ment within the confines of a single river valley, using aerial photographs and fieldsurveys for the purpose.

Landscape and settlement archaeology was nothing new, for European archaeol-ogists like O. G. S. Crawford had been walking the countryside mapping archaeolog-ical sites and using aerial photographs for a generation. But Willey's approach wasmore systematic, combining excavation and survey to produce a map of changingsettlement within a single narrow area. The Viru Valley project made settlementarchaeology popular in the Americas, and regional surveys of such areas as the Valleyof Mexico and the Four Corners area of the American Southwest resulted from it.

By far the most revolutionary advance in scientific archaeology during theseyears was the development of radiocarbon dating by University of Chicago physicistsWillard Libby and J. R. Arnold in 1949. For the first time, archaeologists had aseemingly reliable way to date organic materials from archaeological sites dating tothe past 40,000 years. Grahame Clark was one of the first archaeologists to recognizethe potential of radiocarbon dating. He realized one could now date archaeologicalsites all around the world, and compare the dates of such developments as the begin-nings of agriculture in widely separated parts of the world. In 1961 he publishedWorld Prehistory, a summary of the human past from its beginnings to the rise of civi-lization, based on radiocarbon chronologies. For the first time, a truly global prehis-tory could be written from dated archaeological sites.

World Prehistory would not have been possible without a new generation ofarchaeological discoveries from outside the narrow confines of Europe, the easternMediterranean, and North America. Women played an important part in theseadvances. Dorothy Garrod and Gertrude Caton-Thompson both worked far from thecomfortable world of their homeland. Garrod wrote the first summary of late Ice Agecultures in Britain, then worked on Neanderthal settlement on Gibraltar before car-rying out excavations at Mt. Carmel on the eastern Mediterranean coast that madeher famous. There she found important evidence for the early origins of modernhumans. Meanwhile, Caton-Thompson trained herself in Stone Age archaeology inEgypt, resolved the dating of the Great Zimbabwe ruins in East Africa, then devotedthe rest of her career to notable Stone Age excavations in the Nile Valley region.

Kathleen Kenyon trained under Mortimer Wheeler and retained a lifelong inter-est in Roman sites and pottery styles. But she is best known for her excavations intothe depths of ancient Jericho, where she found some of the earliest farming settle-ments in the world in the 1950s. With her one excavation, she extended the historyof agriculture by at least 4,000 years.

Impressive advances in our knowledge of early human evolution came between1930 and the 1960s, thanks in large part to the researches of Louis and Mary Leakeyin East Africa. Louis Leakey was a missionary's son who trained in archaeology atCambridge. While still in his 20s he discovered an entire sequence of ancient StoneAge cultures in Kenya, working on a financial shoestring. Mary Leakey was a giftedartist with an interest in archaeology who met Louis at Cambridge and became hissecond wife. Together and separately, they worked at many early Stone Age sites,among them the 300,000-year-old hunting site at Olorgsesaillie in the heart ofKenya's Rift Valley. Together they pioneered the excavation of ancient living sitesand hunting camps, leaving the artifacts and associated stone tools in place wherethey originally lay.


At irregular intervals between 1931 and 1959, the Leakeys worked at OlduvaiGorge on northern Tanzania's Serengeti Plains, recovering thousands of finely madestone tools and numerous broken bones of fossil animals killed by early humans. In1959 Mary unearthed one of the great archaeological finds of the 20th century—thewell-preserved skull of a robust ape-human, Zinjanthropus boisei, "East African humanof Boise" named for a benefactor, Mr. Boise. With this single find, and the develop-ment of the potassium-argon dating method—a way of dating ancient lavas by mea-suring radioactive decay rates in the rock—the prehistory of humanity was expandedto over 2 million years ago.

The 1930s to 1960s were years when the Belgian, British, and French empirescovered much of the world. Archaeology flourished in colonial territories aroundthe globe, especially in Africa in the work of Louis and Mary Leakey and a handfulof other dedicated fieldworkers. Notable among them was J. Desmond Clark, whotrained under Grahame Clark and Mortimer Wheeler before going to Northern Rho-desia (now Zambia) as a museum officer in 1938. Clark worked with minimal fund-ing, but with extraordinary effect. He studied the Stone Age cultures of the UpperZambezi Valley, excavated strategic rock shelters, and collected and surveyed dozensof sites in Somalia and Ethiopia during his war service. During the 1950s he exca-vated the 250,000-year-old Kalambo Falls prehistoric site on the Zambia-Tanzaniaborder, one of the most important early Stone Age settlements in tropical Africa.

All of these men and women exercised a profound influence on dozens of youngarchaeologists, who began their studies of the past in the 1950s and 1960s. Theylearned from the single-minded enthusiasm and hard work of a small number ofmen and women who had a passion for the past that was truly infectious. Workingalmost alone, with almost no money, and often under extremely uncomfortable,even dangerous, conditions, they paved the way for the remarkable archaeologicaldiscoveries of today.

In 1949, University of Chicagophysicists Willard Libby, shown here,and j.R. Arnold developed radiocar-bon dating.This innovative processallowed archaeologists to accuratelypinpoint the age of excavation sitesand recovered artifacts.

G R E A T F I E L D W O R K E R S • 1 3 1

GertrudeCaton-Thompson

GREAT Z I M B A B W EAND THE STONE AGE

he arrived at the Great Zimbabwe ruins in Gen-tral Africa riding on an ox cart, her car unable tocross rivers flooded by heavy rain. She was atough, no-nonsense archaeologist who went outto work in tropical Africa in 1929 never having

been there before. She was also the first woman archaeolo-gist to work there. Her name was Gertrude Caton-Thomp-son. By sheer strength of character and a down-to-earthapproach to her work, she showed that Zimbabwe was thework not of some white civilization, as many believed, but ofindigenous African peoples, the ancestors of the moderninhabitants. This was a controversial conclusion in 1929, butthe forthright and hard-headed Caton-Thompson cared lit-tle for public opinion.

Gertrude Caton-Thompson was bom in London in 1888,the daughter of a well-known lawyer who died when she wasfive years old. Until the outbreak of war in 1914, she enjoyeda comfortable life as a member of a wealthy English family,visiting Egypt and the Holy Land with her mother in 1907.They toured the pyramids and ancient Jericho, experiencesthat kindled an interest in the past in an impressionable

In 1939, Gertrude Caton-Thompson had just returned fromimportant excavations on Stone Age sites in Egypt's KhargaOasis. Eight years earlier; Caton-Thompson had published theresults of her Zimbabwe excavations, which brought her aninternational reputation.


s

young woman. She was to make lastingcontributions to the field.

Caton-Thompson did not studyarchaeology seriously until 1919, aftergaining valuable administrative experi-ence during World War I requisitioningmerchant ships for convoy duty. Shestudied Egyptology and Mediterraneanarchaeology at the University of Lon-don, graduating in 1920. The practi-cal work in some of her courses wasunusual. Gertrude learned her survey-ing in a small urban park "where treesand seats were the only fixed objects;the seats in particular were mainlyidentifiable by their inhabitants, mostlyold ladies in hats who moved awaybefore their position was safely estab-lished." Unlike her fellow students,who preferred later, more complex civi-lizations, Caton-Thompson becameinterested in Stone Age archaeologyand early prehistory. She soon devel-oped an expertise with stone artifactsthat was to stand her in good steadlater in her career.

In 1921 Caton-Thompson wentout to work with the great EgyptologistFlinders Petrie at Abydos in UpperEgypt, searching for Stone Age sitesin the desert while Petrie cleared OldKingdom tombs. She soon found morethan two thousand 100,000-year-oldstone tools, while learning a greatdeal of Egyptology back in camp fromPetrie's after-dinner discourses by lamp-light. In Luxor she met archaeologistHoward Carter, who was working inthe Valley of Kings and complainingthat he was finding nothing. A yearlater he discovered the tomb of thepharaoh Tutankhamun.

Caton-Thompson's Egyptian expe-rience established her as a seriousarchaeologist. She now excavated acave on the island of Malta, thenreturned to Egypt in 1924 on an expe-dition of her own. Flinders Petrie hadlong declared that the dry FayumDepression west of the Nile River hadonce been a vast lake, formed when the

river burst into the depression in the5th century BC. But Caton-Thompsonhad some geological training and real-ized there had been more than one lakein the depression. She and geologistElinor Gardner spent two long fieldseasons reconstructing the history ofthe Fayum lake, which had teemedwith fish and wild fowl on several occa-sions since the end of the Ice Ageabout 10,000 years ago.

Caton-Thompson searched forarchaeological sites along the ancientlake shores. She electrified the archae-ological world by finding a humblefarming settlement of crude brush shel-ters and basket-lined storage pits thatcontained carbonized barley and wheatseeds, estimated to date to at least 4000BC. The Fayum site was the earliestknown farming site in the world, dis-covered at a time when archaeologistswere beginning to search seriously forevidence of the earliest farmers in theworld. This remarkable discovery notonly marked Caton-Thompson as anup-and-coming archaeologist, butremained the earliest farming settle-ment on earth until new finds in the1950s at Jericho in Jordan and in Iran,and the new radiocarbon dating tech-nique, pushed back the beginnings ofagriculture to about 8000 BC. (Thelatest dates are nearer 10,000 BC.)

In 1928 Caton-Thompson receivedan important research assignmentfrom the British Association for theAdvancement of Science. She was toexcavate the famous Great Zimbabweruins in southern Africa and report onthem to a meeting of the Association tobe held in South Africa in the follow-ing year. Great Zimbabwe was a contro-versial site, north of the Limpopo Riverin what is now the country of Zim-babwe. An elaborate complex of largestone structures occupied a small valleyovershadowed by a low hill coveredwith artificial enclosures.

European settlers had puzzled overthe freestanding Great Enclosure and

GertrudeCaton-ThompsonBORN


DIED

April 18, 1985Broadway, England

EDUCATION

University of London (B.A. 1920)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Became a leading 20th-centuryStone Age archaeologist; studiedStone Age cultures in the Nile Val-ley, discovered early agricultural set-tlements of the Desert Fayum;. alsofamous for excavations of ruins atGreat Zimbabwe, southern Africa,which established their constructionby native Africans. Wrote memoirsand The Zimbabwe Culture: Ruinsand Reactions (1931).

G E R T R U D E C A T O N - T H O M P S O N 1 3 3

"I tender our thanks, notleast among them [to] thoseunknown correspondentsof lively imagination, whoseletters of advice now Hefiled under the headingINSANE."

—Gertrude Caton-Thompson, The ZimbabweCulture (1931)

rock-Covered hill ruin in 1890. A seriesof archaeologists had then examinedthe ruins at the request of the colonialauthorities. The more imaginative ofthem declared Zimbabwe to be a long-lost palace of the biblical Queen ofSheba, built by the Phoenicians of theancient Mediterranean world. Theydeclared that Africans could neverhave built such sophisticated buildings.In contrast, archaeologist RandallMaclver, also under British Associationpatronage, had concluded in 1905 thatthey were built by the ancestors of themodern-day African inhabitants only afew hundred years earlier. The localwhite settlers were so angry withMaclver that no further excavationstook place for 20 years.

Caton-Thompson entered this con-troversy eagerly, despite never havingtraveled in tropical Africa or excavateda site south of the Sahara Desert. Theruins had been battered by earlier exca-vators, who had shoveled away richarchaeological deposits, leaving littleintact. Any new excavator was con-fronted with a jigsaw puzzle of smallpatches of occupation deposits scatteredover the site, a task that challenged allof Caton-Thompson's skills. Sheapproached Great Zimbabwe withmeticulous care, digging carefully placedtrenches to establish the sequence ofoccupation in various parts of the site.For example, she dug down to bedrockthrough a series of abandoned occupa-tions at the western end of the low hillknown as the Acropolis, which over-looks the enclosures in the valleybeneath. Here she was able to recon-struct the sequence of events at Zim-babwe, starting with a small farmingsettlement, then a spectacular expan-sion of the site and the building of free-standing stone walls and enclosures.

Unlike her predecessors, she paidcareful attention to the tiny glass beadsand other imported artifacts from the

site, which had been carried thereby traders from the distant IndianOcean. Her largest excavation backedup against a stone wall, allowing herto tie a changing sequence of Africanpottery styles to the architecture ofthe site. Experts on Chinese potteryand ancient glass confirmed that Mac-lver had dated Zimbabwe correctlyto the centuries immediately beforePortuguese explorers arrived off thesoutheast African coast in AD 1497.Judging from these imports, Great Zim-babwe was far later than the Phoeni-cian chronology proposed by those whoassumed on racial grounds that Africanscould never have built such structures.

It took considerable courage forCaton-Thompson to announce herconclusions at a time when the localwhite settlers, and many archaeolo-gists, believed Africans were too "primi-tive" to build such a stupendous site.Her address to the British Associa-tion in Johannesburg was a modelof straightforward, unsensationalizedreporting. She expressed her amaze-ment that any thinking person wouldconsider Great Zimbabwe anything butAfrican. Her conclusions were greetedwith anger by settler interests, whodisputed her findings. They refusedto believe that Africans, whom theybelieved were inferior, were capableof building such elaborate structures.Meanwhile, Caton-Thompson's scien-tific reputation was never higher, espe-cially after she conducted a delegationof experts around her excavations atthe site itself.

Caton-Thompson now returned toEgypt, where she excavated an impor-tant series of Stone Age sites in theKharga Oasis, west of the Nile River.Her long report on Kharga recordsStone Age settlement over a period ofmore than 300,000 years and is still thedefinitive account of the area. Shewent back to tropical Africa only once,


for an archaeological conference in1955, where she was able to revisit thescene of her greatest archaeological tri-umph. However, she retained a stronginterest in African archaeology untilher death at the age of 97 in 1985.

Gertrude Caton-Thompson setnew standards in Stone Age archaeol-ogy at a time when almost no womenworked on early prehistoric sites. Strong-minded, and a get-on-with-the-jobresearcher, she was one of the last field

archaeologists who became an expertin more than one field of the subject, aworld authority on both the Stone Ageand the still little-known recent historyof tropical Africa.

FURTHER READING

Caton-Thompson, Gertrude. Mixed Mem-oirs. Gateshead, England: Paradigm, 1983.

Caton-Thompson found these wheatand barley seeds in an early farmingsettlement in the Fayum, Egypt. TheFayum sites were her greatest archaeo-logical discovery because they datedfarming in the Nile Valley to before thetimes of ancient Egypt.

G E R T R U D E C A T O N - T H O M P S O N 1 3 5

DorothyGarrod

E X C A V A T O R OF THEMOUNT C A R M E L C A V E S

orothy Garrod made history not only as thefirst prehistoric archaeologist to become aprofessor of archaeology at Cambridge Uni-versity, but also as the first woman to beappointed to a professorship at the univer-

sity. A quiet, unassuming person, she preferred to work farfrom the limelight, with only a few helpers. During the early1930s Garrod acquired an international reputation by exca-vating the Mount Carmel caves in what was then Palestine,working with a handful of companions. Her excavationsthrew new light on the origins of modern humans: Homosapiens sapiens, "the wise person."

Dorothy Anne Elizabeth Garrod was born in London in1892. Her father was a physician and she enjoyed a happychildhood, during which she acquired a lifelong interest inreading and books. She entered Newnham College, Cam-bridge, in 1913 and graduated three years later with anundistinguished degree. One can hardly blame her, for allthree of her brothers were killed in the early years of World

Tough and single-minded, Dorothy Garrod worked with small budgets and only a few companions, relying on the local people andher fluent Arabic to find promising caves in the Near East.


D

War I. After a short spell in the Min-istry of Munitions, she went to Francewith the Catholic Women's League tocare for the wounded. The job was verystressful. Garrod was forced to with-draw for convalescence to Malta, whereher father was director of war hospitals.The island's prehistoric tombs, builtof massive boulders more than 6,000years ago, fascinated her. She spentdays traveling from tomb to tomb bycar and mule, searching for pot frag-ments and trying to decipher the archi-tecture of these ancient sepulchers. Bythe time she left Malta, Dorothy Gar-rod had acquired a passionate interestin archaeology.

After the war, her father wasappointed professor of medicine atOxford. She now enrolled in anthro-pology courses under the direction ofthe distinguished social anthropologistR. R. Marret of Exeter College. Forsome years Marret had been excavatinga cave occupied by Neanderthal peopleon the island of Jersey in the EnglishChannel. He instilled Garrod with apassion for Neanderthal research, inparticular with an interest in the waysin which these ancient humans weredifferent from modern people in theirtechnological achievements and men-tal capacities.

After she earned a degree withdistinction in 1920, Marret sent herto study under the French prehistoricarchaeologist Abbe Henri Breuil inParis. Garrod not only dug at severalmajor Stone Age rock shelters insouthwestern France, but also acquireda detailed knowledge of Stone Age arti-facts of all kinds, which was to standher in good stead in future years. Gar-rod spoke fluent French and workedclosely with Breuil throughout her life.She was strongly influenced by hisconviction, expressed in print in 1912,that prehistoric Europe was but a penin-sula of Africa and Asia.

Garrod returned to Oxford and,with Breuil's strong encouragement,

"Today prehistory has suffered the fate of so many of thecomponent parts of the orderly universe of the 19th century.New knowledge has given a twist to the kaleidoscope andnew pieces are still falling about before our bewildered eyes."

—Dorothy Garrod, "The Upper Palaeolithic in theLight of Recent Discovery" (1938)

embarked on a meticulous study of allthe late Ice Age sites and artifactsknown in Britain. This researchinvolved extensive traveling to visitarchaeological locations, long hours inmuseum collections examining artifacts,and months in libraries reading every-thing that had been written on thesubject. The resulting book, The UpperPalaeolithic Age in Britain (1926),received wide attention for its accuracyand shrewd judgements.

Breuil now recognized that it wastime for Garrod to excavate on herown. He suggested that she investigatethe Devil's Tower in Gibraltar at theextreme southern tip of Spain. Shedug into the site for five months in1925 and duly recovered Neanderthalremains together with stone artifactsand many animal bones. Her fossil bonefinds were so fascinating that she wasable to attract a team of distinguishedspecialists to collaborate on her report,which attracted wide attention when itappeared in 1928.

While Garrod was working inGibraltar, another English archaeolo-gist, Francis Turville-Petre, had founda young Neanderthal adult skeletonin the Zettupeh Cave by the Sea ofGalilee. The find attracted the atten-tion of the American School of Pre-historic Research, which had beenfounded in 1921 to encourage Ameri-can archaeologists to work in Europe.

D O R O T H Y G A R R O D 1 3 7

Encouraged by her mentor, the prehisto-rian Abbe Henri Breuil, Dorothy Garroddid her first solo excavation among therocks of Gibraltar where she found theskull remains of a Neanderthal child.

In 1926 the school's interests shifted,largely as a result of the Zettupehdiscovery. This was the easternmostknown Neanderthal find at the time.The school engaged Garrod to look forfinds even farther to the east. She vis-ited the Kirkuk region in northeasternIraq in 1927, where in a cave she foundcharacteristic Neanderthal artifactssuch as crude stone spear points andscraping tools used for cleaning animalskins. A year later she returned to exca-vate two more caves in the same area.The Hazar Merd and Zarzi caves yieldedNeanderthal occupation neatly sand-wiched below later Stone Age levels.

Fresh from these excavations, Gar-rod traveled to the eastern Mediter-ranean coast, where she found promis-ing caves at Mount Carmel in what isnow Israel. These, she realized, weresites that would yield a sequence of

changing Stone Age cultures poten-tially as rich as those in southwesternFrance investigated by Henri Breuil.Between 1929 and 1934 she exca-vated the Mount Carmel caves withthe assistance of American biologicalanthropologist Theodore McCown, anexpert on human remains. Garrod andMcCown excavated three caves, oneof which contained a virtual cemeteryof Neanderthal skeletons. The excava-tions at Mugharet el-Wad, et-Tabun,and es-Skhul rank among the mostimportant archaeological investigationsof the 20th century.

Garrod worked near-miracles witha small team of colleagues and localworkers. She uncovered deep layers ofhuman occupation that extended farback into the Ice Age—at least 75,000years ago. The finds were very differentfrom those in western European caves,where tools made on fine blades fol-lowed simpler, Neanderthal artifacts.Everything was more complicated atMount Carmel. Instead of a simple pro-gression from crude spear points andscraping tools to fine-blade artifacts inlater layers, some Neanderthal levelsalso contained fine blades and scrapers.

These artifacts were virtually iden-tical to those made by Cro-Magnons inEurope many thousands of years later.Most archaeologists had assumed thatmodern people and their fine stonetechnology had first evolved in Europe,then spread elsewhere. The MountCarmel discoveries turned everythingon its head. Now the earliest bladetechnology, thought to be the work ofmodern humans, appeared in south-western Asia, as if Homo sapiens sapienshad first evolved there, then spreadinto Europe.

The European Neanderthals wereshort, primitive looking people with


receding foreheads, prominent snouts,flat noses, and massive bone browridges over their eye sockets. WhenGarrod excavated the es-Skhul cave atMount Carmel, she found a Nean-derthal cemetery where the skeletonsshowed a remarkable mix of thickNeanderthal bones and compact limbscombined with such traits as high fore-heads and reduced eyebrow ridges thatare more typical of modern humans.The Mount Carmel Neanderthals wereanatomically more advanced than theirEuropean contemporaries.

In 1936 Dorothy Garrod gave anaddress to the British Association forthe Advancement of Science in whichshe proclaimed that the distinctiveculture of the Cro-Magnons had origi-nated not in Europe, but in southwest-ern Asia. From there, modern humanshad spread north and westward, shestated. At the time, her report causeda stir, especially among those whobelieved that modern humans had orig-inated in western Europe. Garrod wasone of the first prehistoric archaeolo-gists to look at human prehistory froma global perspective, to argue that thestory of early humanity could not beunderstood from Europe alone.

The publication of the first volumeof The Stone Age of Mount Carmel in1937 established Garrod as a prehisto-rian of the first rank. Two years latershe was elected Disney Professor ofArchaeology at Cambridge, the firstfieldworker to hold the post. Unfortu-nately, her tenure was broken by WorldWar II, when she served in the RoyalAir Force aerial photography interpre-tation unit. After the war, she devotedmuch energy to expanding degree pro-grams in prehistoric archaeology atCambridge, insisting that a course onworld prehistory be introduced into

what had previously been a somewhatnarrow curriculum. But her heart wasnot in the administrative and commit-tee work expected of a university pro-fessor. Nor was she comfortable in apredominantly male academic environ-ment. She took early retirement in1952 and moved to France, where sheresumed fieldwork on Stone Age caves.

Her retirement years saw moreexcavations, this time in France at thelate Ice Age Angles-sur-Anglin rockshelter, where she found a 16,000-year-old bas-relief of animals and women.The depiction of women in was rarein Cro-Magnon sculpture. She alsoreturned to the Near East, where sheundertook a series of digs in an attemptto clarify the relationships betweenNeanderthal and modern human occu-pations of some 50,000 years ago. Thesewere on a smaller scale than the MountCarmel excavations, but neverthelessdid much to describe the prehistoriccultures of a vital region in human pre-history. She died at her home in Francein 1968.

Dorothy Garrod was a shy, retiringperson who was at her best in the field.She was one of a small group of women,including Gertrude Caton-Thompsonand Kathleen Kenyon, who led the wayfor the many female archaeologists ofthe next generation. She herself wouldhave denied she did anything special,but her Mount Carmel discoveriesturned archaeology from a provincialundertaking into the study of a trulyglobal human prehistory.

FURTHER READING

Clark, Grahame. Prehistory at Cambridgeand Beyond. New York: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1989.

DorothyGarrodBORN

May 5, 1892London, England

DIED

December 18, 1968Villebois-Lavalette, Charente,France

EDUCATION

Newnham College, Cambridge(B.A. 1916); Exeter College,Oxford (M.A. 1920)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Made the first study of late Ice Agepeoples in Britain; discovered Nean-derthal fossils and artifacts at Devil'sTower, Gibraltar; excavated theMount Carmel caves in Palestine;the first prehistorian and firstwoman to be appointed Disney Pro-fessor of Archaeology at CambridgeUniversity; one of the earliestarchaeologists to develop ideas ofworld prehistory. Wrote The UpperPalaeolithic Age in Britain (1926);The Stone Age of Mount Carmel(with Dorothea M. A. Bate, 1937).

D O R O T H Y O A R R O D 1 3 9

KathleenKenyon

E X C A V A T O ROF J E R I C H O

athleen Mary Kenyon was passionate aboutarchaeology and dogs. Everywhere shewent, she was accompanied by her fox ter-riers, who terrified her workers. In herarchaeological work, she found one of the

earliest fanning settlements in the world at the base of thegreat city mound at Jericho in Jordan, dating to more than8,000 years ago. Many of her excavations threw importantlight on the historical narratives in the Old Testament.

Kenyon was born in London in 1906. She was theelder of the two daughters of Sir Frederick Kenyon, a distin-guished biblical scholar and Director of the British Museum.His researches included both textual criticism and biblicalarchaeology. Young Kathleen grew up in a family wherearchaeology and the Holy Land were constant topics of

In 1959, Kathleen Kenyon stands in the IOth millennium BCshrine, Natufian, in Jericho.Through her work, Kenyon discovereda firm transition from the hunter/gatherer stage of human devel-opment to the settled pastoralist period.


K

conversation. Her interest in archaeol-ogy began long before she went toSomerville College, Oxford, in 1926.Three years later, she graduated withhonors in archaeology. ArchaeologistGertrude Caton-Thompson promptlyoffered her the job of photographer onthe British Association for Advance-ment of Science's expedition to GreatZimbabwe in southern Africa. Kenyonnot only took photographs but alsosupervised some of the excavations.The Zimbabwe digs were of greatimportance because they proved thatthese stupendous stone ruins were builtnot by colonizing Europeans, but byindigenous Africans before AD 1500.

The Zimbabwe expedition gaveKenyon excellent credentials as a field-worker. She next spent four years, from1930 to 1935, as a member of the exca-vation on the Roman town at Veru-lamium, just north of London. Theproject was directed by MortimerWheeler and his wife Tessa, bothexpert fieldworkers and specialists indigging Roman sites. From the Wheel-ers, Kenyon acquired rigorous excava-tion skills that were to stand her ingood stead in her later career in south-western Asia. In particular, she learnedMortimer Wheeler's specialty: carefulexcavation and recording of thin strataof human occupation lying one abovethe other like layers of a cake, eachwith its distinctive pottery, whichhelped date the layer. The Wheelersgave her the task of excavating Veru-lamium's Roman theater, the only oneof its kind in Britain.

Verulamium was not her onlyexcavation. She spent much time dur-ing the winters between 1931 to 1934on excavations sponsored by the Pales-tine Exploration Fund at the ancientcity of Samaria. Here she gainedinvaluable experience investigatingmud-brick architecture and the com-plex local pottery styles from theNeolithic to Greek times. She analyzedthe complex sequence of different

occupations in a degree of detailunimaginable during earlier HarvardUniversity excavations in 1908-10.

Kenyon's association with Mor-timer Wheeler continued after 1935,when he moved to London University'snewly founded Institute of Archaeol-ogy. She served as its administrativesecretary, and as acting director from1942 to 1946, while also working forthe British Red Cross in World War II.During her years at the institute shestudied the huge pottery collectionsexcavated in Palestine by the Egyptolo-gist Flinders Petrie. Pottery became herprimary interest in her later career, forshe believed it was an excellent way ofdating the layers buried beneath mod-ern cities. Her excavations on theJewry Wall area of the city of Leicesterfrom 1936 to 1939 produced a remark-able chronicle of little-known Romanpottery styles that is still widely used.By studying the minute changes in dec-oration and pottery form, Kenyon pro-duced a detailed catalog of how thesestyles changed through time. She wasalso able to date many of the styles,thereby providing a time scale for hith-erto undated Roman pottery designs.

From 1948 to 1961 KathleenKenyon served as a lecturer in NearEastern Archaeology at London Uni-versity, a post that did not prevent herfrom excavating further Roman sitesin Britain. She also collaborated witharchaeologist John Ward-Perkins onthe excavation of the Roman town ofSabratha in Libya in 1948 and 1949and again in 1951, one of the firstBritish overseas excavations after thewar. Sabratha was founded by Phoeni-cian merchants in the 5th century BC,then became an important Roman set-tlement in the 2nd century AD, beforebeing extensively damaged by an earth-quake in AD 365. Kenyon's primaryinterest was the pottery, recovered fromboth public buildings like the forumand from houses in the town. Just as atLeicester, she worked out a complicated

K A T H L E E N K E N Y O N 1 4 1

This plan of Jerusalem, in a ByzantineChristian mosaic in a church floor in thesmall town of Madaba, Jordan dates to the6th or 7th century. It is said to be one ofthe best maps of the biblical lands and isstill in the floor of the church.

sequence of changing pottery stylesthrough the centuries, designed as ayardstick for studying and dating Romansites over a large area. Unfortunately,she never had time to publish her stud-ies in full.

By 1951 she had turned her atten-tion entirely to the Near East, workingclosely with the British School ofArchaeology in Jerusalem on a large-scale excavation into the biblical cityof Jericho. From 1952 to 1958 an inter-national team of archaeologists andstudents worked under her direction,digging into the lowermost levels ofthe great city mound.

Both German and British expedi-tions had worked at Jericho, but nei-ther had used excavation methods asmeticulous as those Kenyon brought tothe site. She introduced very accuratesite recording, careful pottery cata-loging, and precise surveys of buriedbuildings. Initially, her primary goalwas to identify the biblical Jericho,whose walls had been felled by Joshua'strumpets during the 13th century BC—a dramatic Old Testament account

that appealed to wealthy donors. Theprevious British excavator, JohnGarstang, had discovered substantialcity walls, which he claimed were thevery fortifications blown down bytrumpets. But Kenyon proved conclu-sively that they were Bronze Age forti-fications, much earlier than Joshua'swalls. Biblical scholars were discon-certed by these findings, which causedmuch controversy between archaeolo-gists and those who believed that theOld Testament was the historical truthand an accurate account of what hadhappened in the past. Joshua's siegetook place much later, during the IronAge occupation of the city. No traceof collapsed walls in that period camefrom Kenyon's excavations.

Meanwhile, Kenyon continued todig ever deeper into the lowest levelsof the city mound. To her surprise, shefound stratified Stone Age towns, or atleast large villages, below the BronzeAge levels, with distinctive architec-ture and one with a substantial stonedefense wall, complete with watch-tower. The earliest Jericho was a tiny


"Jericho can make, the proudclaim to be the earliestknown town on earth."

—Kathleen Kenyon,Digging Up Jericho (1957)

farming village located by a naturalspring; it was 4,000 years older thanGertrude Caton-Thompson's Fayumvillages in Egypt. Kenyon's meticulousexcavations caused a worldwide sensa-tion, both because they provided veryearly dates for agriculture in the JordanValley, around 8000 BC, and becausethey dated settled agricultural townsat least 4,000 years earlier than hith-erto suspected.

Kenyon continued to work on pub-lications about the Jericho excavationsfor the rest of her life. Meanwhile, sheagain collaborated with the BritishSchool in Jerusalem, this time on exca-vations in East Jerusalem, at that timeinside Jordan. This area of the historiccity had close associations with the OldTestament and was undergoing rapiddevelopment. Between 1961 and 1967she worked at a variety of Jerusalemsites, producing a steady stream of arti-cles, reports, and two books on theexcavations, which did much to clarifythe intricate history of the city.

The year the Jerusalem projectbegan, she was appointed Principal ofSt. Hugh's College, Oxford, a presti-gious post that kept her much occupiedwith administrative duties and commit-tees of every kind. But she managed topublish a series of books, among themthe influential Beginning in Archaeology(1952), aimed at encouraging studentsto enter the field, and Archaeology inthe Holy Land (1960), a textbook on

Palestinian archaeology for beginners.She stressed the deep roots of historyin the Near East, writing: "In Palestineand other places in the Near East,archaeology has pushed back our knowl-edge of places and people to thousandsof years before written history."

Just before she retired from St.Hugh's in 1971, Kathleen Kenyon wasappointed a Dame Commander of theOrder of the British Empire by QueenElizabeth II for her services to archaeol-ogy. She continued to be active as apublic lecturer and on committees oflearned societies until her death at theage of 72.

This remarkable archaeologistbrought the study of biblical archaeol-ogy to a wide popular audience andrevolutionized our understanding ofthe world's earliest agriculture. Shealso trained a generation of now emi-nent archaeologists, as well as Jordan-ian scholars and excavation workers.Kenyon's research was very detailed,much of it focused on the use of potteryto interpret sequences of occupationlevels with highly technical methods.At Jericho, she focused on digging ver-tically down to the bottom of the citymound rather than uncovering broadareas of different communities. Hadshe worked on a broader canvas, muchmore could have been learned there.To date, no one has taken over whereher Jericho excavations left off. Butwith her popular writings she intro-duced thousands of people to theenduring fascination of biblical archae-ology. Her work will continue to bedebated for generations.

FURTHER READING

Moorey, P. S., and P. Parr, eds. Archaeologyin the Levant: Essays for Kathleen Kenyon.Warminster, England: Aris and Phillips,1978.

KathleenKenyonBORN

January 5, 1906London, England

DIED

August 24, 1978London, England

EDUCATION

Somerville College, Oxford(B.A. 1929)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Expert on Roman Britain, Romano-British pottery, and the archaeologyof the Roman provinces generally;excavated Jericho, finding some ofthe earliest farming settlements,and the earliest town; developedelaborate methods using potteryto analyze interpret occupation lev-els in archaeological sites; broughtnew understanding of archaeologyat Jericho and Jerusalem to a wideaudience. Wrote Beginning inArchaeology (1952); Digging upJericho (1957); Archaeology in theHoly Land (1960).

K A T H L E E N K E N Y O N 1 43

MortimerWheeler

E X C A V A T O RE X T R A O R D I N A I R E

he whole war cemetery lay before MortimerWheeler, exposed in a windy trench atopMaiden Castle, a great Iron Age hill fort insouthern England. He had uncovered thecasualties from a brutal Roman attack on

the fort in AD 43. There were skeletons in profusion, display-ing savage wounds from sword and lance. In his report onthe discovery, he wrote of the aftermath of the attack, whenthe defenders crept up to the abandoned fort in the darkand buried their dead with simple food offerings while theRomans' campfires twinkled a short distance away. MortimerWheeler was a consummate excavator and an archaeologist ofvivid imagination who used to proclaim that archaeology wasoften too dull. Flamboyant, volatile, and given to overstate-ment, Wheeler spent a lifetime making the past come alive.

Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler was born in Edinburgh,Scotland, in 1890. The 85 years of his colorful life spannedthe decades when archaeology changed from a largely ama-teur pastime into a scientific discipline. His father was a

Known for his meticulous methods and strictly organized digs, Mortimer Wheeler helped change archaeology from a hobby to ascience. Using his military background, Wheeler, as in this 1945 excavation ofTaxila-Sirkap, Pakistan, carefully examined each layerand documented even the smallest artifacts.


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journalist with a background in classics,both interests that had a profoundinfluence on his son. At age 17 youngWheeler won a scholarship to Univer-sity College, London, to study Classics.He also took classes at the Slade Schoolof Art, for he had ambitions to becomean artist. After graduating with a B.A.in 1910 and an M.A. in 1912, heapplied for a postgraduate studentshipto study Roman pottery in Germany'sRhineland. He then joined the RoyalCommission on Historical Monumentsfor England as an investigator, butentered the army at the outbreak ofWorld War I. He served with distinc-tion in the Royal Artillery, ending thewar with the rank of major and receiv-ing the Military Cross.

By the end of World War I Wheelerhad acquired the background and expe-rience that were to guide his career. Hehad a fluent writing style learned fromhis father, a background in classics andarchaeology, and a gift for logistics andorganization acquired in the army. Fora short while he returned to the RoyalCommission, but was appointed Keeperof Archaeology at the newly foundedNational Museum of Wales and Lec-turer in Archaeology at UniversityCollege, Cardiff, in 1920. Four yearslater he became director and set themuseum on a sound financial basis.

Between 1920 and 1926 Wheelerand his wife Tessa revolutionized Welsharchaeology with a series of majorexcavations on Roman frontier forts.At the time, most archaeological exca-vation was still little more than anuncontrolled search for spectacularartifacts. The Wheelers adopted andrefined the almost forgotten excavationmethods of the Victorian excavatorGeneral Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers. Theypaid careful attention to observingeven shallow layers in the soil, recov-ered the smallest of potsherds andother artifacts, and published techni-cal reports promptly, illustrated withWheeler's own fine drawings. But this

was not enough for the energetic inves-tigator, who believed the public hadthe right to know about his researches.He gave many public lectures andwrote a popular book, Prehistoric andRoman Wales, published in 1925.

Wheeler's apprenticeship in Walesestablished his credentials as a seriousarchaeologist. He was offered the firstprofessorship of Prehistoric Archae-ology at Edinburgh University, butturned in down in favor of a nonaca-demic career. In 1926 he came Keeperof the much neglected LondonMuseum, which he promptly resusci-tated. Every summer he continuedexcavations, each designed to clarifythe relationships between indigenousand the occupying Roman society inBritain and to train a new generationof young archaeologists.

In 1928 and 1929 he worked ata Roman sanctuary at Lydney inGloucestershire. Then he turned hisattention to the late Iron Age andRoman city of Verulamium just northof London, where he spent four yearsfrom 1930 through 1933, training suchfuture excavators as Kathleen Kenyonin the process. Verulamium lay in opencountry, unlike many Roman townsthat are buried under modern cities.He and his wife Tessa exposed 11 acres(4.45 hectares) of the city, as well astracing the complicated history of itsoutlying earthworks and the smallerforts and settlements that had precededit. By the time his report on Veru-lamium was published in 1936, he wastired of the Romans and looking fornew topics to research.

The pace of Wheeler's administra-tive life was as exhausting as his field-work. Once the London Museum wasrevived, he founded the Institute ofArchaeology at London Universityin 1934 and lectured there part-time.Three years later he became directorof the institute, which soon becamerenowned for its training in fieldworkand scientific methods.

MortimerWheelerBORNSeptember 10, 1890Glasgow, Scotland

DIED

July 22, 1976Leatherhead, England

EDUCATION

University College, London(B.A. 1910, M.A. 1912)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Developed modern excavationmethods in Britain and India; revo-lutionized the study of Iron Age andRoman Britain with excavations atRoman Verulamium and MaidenCastle in southern England; madeexcavations in what is now Pakistanthat transformed scientific knowl-edge of the Harappan (Indus)civilization; founded the LondonInstitute of Archaeology. WroteArchaeology from the Earth (1954);Still Digging: Leaves from an Anti-quary's Notebook (1955); Almsfor Oblivion: An Antiquary's Scrap-book (1966).

M O R T I M E R W H E E L E R 1 45

"Dead archaeology is the driest dust that blows."

—Mortimer Wheeler, Archaeology from the Earth (1954)

The culmination of Wheeler'sBritish excavations came when heturned his attention to the enormousIron Age hill fort at Maiden Castle insouthern England. During the summersof 1934 to 1937, he and Tessa devel-oped the art of archaeological excava-tion to heights never achieved before.They excavated deep trenches throughMaiden Castle's multiple lines ofearthen ramparts. They investigatedbroad sections of the interior with shal-low area trenches. Hundreds of visitorstoured the excavations each summer,for the Wheelers believed in keepingthe public informed about their work.An entire generation of young archae-ologists worked at Maiden Castle,among them J. Desmond Clark, laterto become an internationally famousAfrican archaeologist. Despite thetragic early death of Tessa and theadvent of World War II, Wheelerpublished the final report on MaidenCastle in 1943.

With his bristling mustache andflowing hair, Wheeler was a formidablepersonality who tolerated little criti-cism and did not have patience withthose he considered fools. He drovethe paid workers and volunteers onhis excavations very hard, with scantregard for their feelings. His colleaguestrod carefully in his presence. With hisbrusque, authoritarian ways, Wheelermade many enemies. But no onedenied his talents as an organizer and

leader, as the archaeologist whobrought British excavation and field-work into the modern world. MaidenCastle led to his first expeditionabroad, an investigation of Iron Agehill forts across the English Channel inBrittany in 1938 and 1939. This wasWheeler at his best, formulating a spe-cific research plan, then executing itwith brilliant skill.

Wheeler returned to the RoyalArtillery with the outbreak of WorldWar II in 1939. His coolness and deci-sive leadership under fire led to rapidpromotion. At the battle of El Alameinin North Africa in 1942, Wheelerspent much of his time in a truck sur-rounded by telephones directing anti-aircraft fire. He also restored the confi-dence of his men by calmly shavingwith a mirror propped up against hisjeep while under artillery fire. He wassoon promoted to Brigadier and wouldhave risen higher, had he not been invi-ted by the Viceroy of India to becomeDirector General of the ArchaeologicalSurvey of India. He led his regimentin the initial stages of the Italian cam-paign, then sailed for India in 1944.

The Archaeological Survey ofIndia confronted Wheeler with anextraordinary challenge. The surveywas moribund, with an untrained anddemoralized staff and an entire conti-nent to cover. Wheeler arrived witha mandate to train an Indian staffin high standards of excavation and

publication, and to provide a soundchronological framework for India'spast. Fresh from military command, hestrode into the survey offices to findpeople dozing at their desks. A loudshout woke them up. Within 10 daysthe office was functioning efficiently.

Wheeler then set off on a whirl-wind tour of India to meet outlyingstaff and, like a general on a militarycampaign, devise a strategy for majorchanges. He started a rigorous six-month training program at Taxila,a city in northern India visited byAlexander the Great in the 4th cen-tury AD. The 61 students worked longhours and learned a standard of excava-tion unheard of in India. His methodsare still faithfully used in India andPakistan to this day. Wheeler alsofounded an academic journal, AncientIndia, then excavated Arikamedu, atrading station on the southeast coast.This site yielded Roman pottery, allow-ing him to establish chronologicalconnections with the Roman worldof the day.

Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, twogreat prehistoric cities in the IndusValley of what is now Pakistan, pro-vided Wheeler's greatest challenge. Hedeployed his now skilled fieldworkers atboth cities and uncovered great citadelsand massive defense works, as well asstandardized grids of streets and brickhouses. The excavations applied allhis experience with Roman sites inBritain to huge cities, whose size didnot intimidate him in the least. Hiswork culminated in a classic accountof the so-called Indus Civilization,which appeared as part of the Cam-bridge History of India in 1950.

Wheeler served in India for fiveyears, leaving a year after the country


became independent in 1948. Hereturned to the continent on severaloccasions as an adviser to the govern-ment of Pakistan. A generation ofIndian and Pakistani archaeologistsperpetuated his research methods.Back in England, he spent five yearsas Professor of the Archaeology of theRoman Provinces at the London Insti-tute of Archaeology. During these yearshe excavated the Iron Age hill fortat Stanwick in Yorkshire, anotherbrilliant investigation of a hithertounknown site. But he found academiclife an inadequate challenge, soresigned in 1949 to become part-timeadministrator to another moribundinstitution, the British Academy.

Over the next 20 years he trans-formed the academy from an organiza-tion of tired, self-satisfied old men intoa dynamic institution at the forefrontof research in the humanities andsocial sciences. He paid particularattention to directing research moneyto scholars work-ing in remote parts ofthe world. To Wheeler, archaeologywas an international endeavor, some-thing much broader than merelyRoman or Iron Age Britain.

At the same time, he continued topopularize archaeology at every possibleopportunity. He was knighted for hisservices to archaeology by King GeorgeVI in 1952. In that year, the BritishBroadcasting Corporation launched apopular archaeology television series,Animal, Vegetable., Mineral, in whicha panel of archaeologists identifiedobjects from antiquity. Wheeler soonbecame a TV star, so much so that hewas voted "television personality of theyear" in 1954. His TV appearances andconstant public lecturing did much tomake archaeology a popular subject.

Wheeler himself believed that scholarshave a moral obligation to share theirscientific work with lay people. Latergenerations of archaeologists have takenhis example to heart. He remainedactive until his death in 1976.

Mortimer Wheeler lived his lifeto the full. A brilliant excavator andsuperb administrator, the magnitude ofhis achievements speak for themselves.One of Wheeler's contemporaries, NearEastern excavator Max Mallowan, aptlydescribed him as "a fire-breathing giantwho bestrode the world like a colossus."

FURTHER READING

Hawkes, Jacquetta. Mortimer Wheeler:Adventurer in Archaeology. London: Wei-denfeld and Nicholson, 1982.

An aerial view of Maiden Castle showsthe steep earthworks built by the earlyinhabitants. Attackers had to make theirway through the narrow passages, wherethe defenders could shower them witharrows and stones.

M O R T I M E R W H E E L E R 1 4 7

Louisand MaryLeakey

THE F I R S T F A M I L Y OFP A L E O A N T H R O P O L O G Y

hey excavated surrounded by Dalmatiandogs, in tropical heat that would makenormal people melt. Painstakingly, inch byinch, they exposed the fragile bones of long-extinct animals on some of the earliest

archaeological sites in the world. Together, they searchedfor the earliest human ancestors for more than a quarter-century. And, in the end, they found not one but severalof them. Few archaeological partnerships have been so suc-cessful and so enduring.

Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey was the son of a Protestantmissionary. He spent his childhood among the Kikuyu ofcentral Kenya and became interested in archaeology as ateenager. In 1922 he entered St. John's College, Cambridge,where he was sent off a university tennis court for wearingshorts, a near scandalous breach of propriety at the time. Hegraduated with an anthropology degree in 1926 and immedi-ately mounted a shoestring archaeological expedition toKenya. Leakey excavated a series of sites, including Gamble'sCave, where he found human occupation going back an esti-mated 20,000 years. He also married his first wife, Freda. Hisfirst book, The Stone Age Cultures of Kenya Colony, was pub-lished to much acclaim in 1930. In this now-classic volume,Leakey outlined a long sequence of Stone Age cultures inEast Africa quite unlike those found in Europe. It was amajor scientific advance for the time. He received a doctor-ate from Cambridge University in 1930 on the basis of hisKenya research.

In 1931 Leakey set out for East Africa again, this timewith the intention of visiting Olduvai Gorge, a 25-mile (40-kilometer) slash through the Serengeti Plains of what is nownorthern Tanzania. He traveled with German paleontologistHans Reck, who had previously visited the gorge and foundfossil elephant remains there. Reck had bet Leakey the thenhuge sum of £10 (about $40) that he would not find anyhuman artifacts in the gorge. Leakey collected the wager onthe very first day and soon established that Olduvai offered aunique chance to study the very earliest humans of all.

Back in Cambridge in 1934, Leakey left his first wife fora young archaeological student, Mary Nicol, who possessed aremarkable talent for drawing stone artifacts. Born in 1913,Mary was the daughter of a landscape artist. She was a quiet,determined person who was the exact opposite of the flam-boyant Leakey. They shared a passion for archaeology andwere to work together for three decades. They were marriedin 1936.

The same year, Louis was given funds for a year's studyof the Kikuyu people. While he worked with the Kikuyu,


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Mary excavated a series of sites, amongthem Njoro River Cave, a cavern usedby late Stone Age people as a cemeteryfor the cremated dead. When WorldWar II broke out in 1939, Louis becameinvolved in intelligence work, but theLeakeys never let the war, or a growingfamily, interfere with their archaeology.In 1943 they excavated a magnificent300,000-year-old Stone Age site atOlorgesaillie, in the Rift Valley nearNairobi, where early humans had killedand butchered large animals, includ-ing rhinoceroses. Hand axes used forbutchering were lying where their usershad dropped them 1,000 centuries ago.The Leakeys turned the site into oneof the world's first open-air museumsin 1947.

The next year, the Leakeys turnedtheir attention to Rusinga Island innortheastern Lake Victoria, where Marywalked through crumbling gullies thatcut through 20-million-year-oldMiocene deposits. She saw some skullfragments and a tooth lying on an

eroding slope. She shouted for Louis,who came running. Together theybrushed away dirt from what Leakeycalled in a letter the "better part of askull" of an apelike creature known asProconsul africanus. The new fossil threwfresh light on very early human ancestry.

In 1951 the Leakeys resumed theirinvestigations at Olduvai Gorge, whereLouis was absolutely certain they wouldfind an early human fossil. Between1951 and 1958 they worked on thefive geological beds of the gorge, fineclays and sands laid down by a shallowlake at a time when the surroundinglandscape teemed with animals. Insteadof systematic collecting, they concen-trated on locating ancient "livingfloors," places where early humanshad camped or butchered animals. By1958 they had recovered large numbersof stone tools and the remains ofdozens of extinct animal species, someof them from locations where the ani-mals were butchered with crude stonechoppers and flakes. Except for a few

Louis and Mary Leakey with the600,000 year old skull, Zinjanthropusboisei. Mary found the skull whileexploring a site at Olduvai Gorge,Tan-zania with her two dogs. The recoveryof this skull in 1959 sparked a majorexcavation that along with uncoveringthousands of artifacts, developed exca-vation methods that are still used tothis day.

L O U I S A N D M A R Y L E A K E Y 1 4 9

Louis S. B.LeakeyBORNAugust 7, 1903Kabete, Kenya

DIED

October 2, 1972London, England

EDUCATION

St. John's College, Cambridge (B.A.1926, M.A. 1929, Ph.D. 1930)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Established the Stone Age archae-ology of Kenya; was one of thefounders of African archaeology asa serious scientific pursuit; withMary Leakey made fossil discoveriesat Rusinga Island and OlduvaiGorge that revolutionized the studyof human origins; advocated andpopularized a multidisciplinaryapproach to investigating humanorigins. Wrote The Stone Age Cul-tures of Kenya Colony (1931);Adam's Ancestors (1934); By the Evi-dence: Memoirs, 1932-1951 (1974);Olduvai Gorge: A Report on the Evo-lution of the Hand-Axe Culture inBeds I-IV( 1951).

"We almost cried with sheer joy, each seized by that terrificemotion that comes rarely in life. After all our hoping andhardship and sacrifice, at last we had reached our goal—we had found the worlds earliest human [Zinjanthropus]."

—Louis Leakey, "Exploring 1,750,000 Years Into Man'sPast," National Geographic Magazine (1961)

fragmentary hominid (early human orprehuman) teeth, there were no traces

of human fossils.Then, on July 17, 1959, Louis was

in bed back at camp with a slight fever.Mary went out with her two Dalmatian

dogs to examine a location that hadyielded tools back in 1931, but hadnot been examined closely since. Shenoticed a scrap of thick skull project-ing from the sloping lake bed. Gently

brushing away the soil, she saw twolarge teeth set in a curved hominid jaw.She jumped into her Land Rover and

raced back to camp, bursting in on a

dozing Louis. "I've got him!" she cried.His illness forgotten, they looked at theteeth with a wave of emotion. Louisrecalled: "At last we had reached ourgoal—we had discovered the world's

earliest known human." As soon as themany pieces were recovered from the

soil, Mary reconstructed the skull of a

robust-looking ape-human, which they

named Zinjanthropus boisei, "Southernape-human of Boise," after a benefac-tor, Mr. Boise). Mary nicknamed thefossil "Dear Boy."

Almost overnight, the Leakeys

became international celebrities. They

were adopted by the National Geo-graphic Society, which published arti-cles on Olduvai and Zinjanthropus,while giving them a large researchgrant for further work. Louis estimated

that Zinjanthropus was about 600,000years old. He, and the rest of the scien-

tific community, were stunned whentwo geophysicists from the Universityof California, Berkeley, used the newpotassium-argon dating method formeasuring radioactive decay in vol-canic rocks to date the Zinjanthropussite to 1.75 million years. At one

stroke, human origins had become

three times as old.While Louis traveled in the United

States and Europe, Mary undertook amajor excavation of the Zinjanthropussite, which she excavated grid square

by grid square with meticulous care.All the soil from the site was passed

through fine-mesh screens to recover

even the smallest rodent bones andother bits of evidence. From thisremarkable excavation, Mary not onlyrecovered thousands of bone fragmentsand stone tools, but also developedmethods for excavating early human

sites that are still in use today.


Mary D.LeakeyBORNFebruary 6, 1913London, England

DIED

December 9, 1996Nairobi, Kenya

EDUCATION

Private; honorary doctorates fromBritish and American universitiesand the University of Witwater-srand, Johannesburg, South Africa

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

The more scientific member of theLeakey partnership; skilled excava-tor and expert at drawing stonetools; made numerous Kenya exca-vations and human fossil discoverieswith Louis Leakey; made otherimportant fossil discoveries at Oldu-vai Gorge; discovered 3.6 million-year-old Laetoli hominid prints inTanzania. Wrote Olduvai Gorge: MySearch for Early Man (1979), Oldu-vai Gorge, Vol 3: Excavations in BedsI and II, 1960-1963 (1971).The I 1-year-old Philip Leakey watches as his parents excavate the so-called "Pre-Zinj"

floor at Olduvai Gorge, where the skull of Homo habilis, the first toolmaker, came tolight. The family dog looks on.

Larger-scale excavations at nearby Homo ergaster in modern classificatorylocations yielded yet more hominid fos- terms, at a high level in the gorge,sils, including an almost complete foot, By the 1960s, Mary bore the bruntthis time from a more lightly built crea- of the field research, living almost fullture quite different from Zinjanthropus. time at Olduvai Gorge. She wrote theThe well-known South African biologi- definitive study of the earliest humancal anthropologist Philip Tobias named culture in the world, named thethe new hominid Homo habiUs, "handy Oldowan, after Olduvai Gorge. Theyperson," the first toolmaking human. In had a simple tool technology of stone1960 Louis found a massive skull of an choppers and flakes. Now she wasanatomically more advanced human, internationally recognized as a scientist

L O U I S A N D M A R Y L E A K E Y • 1 5 1

"We are having a wildly exciting time here with [the 3.6million-year-old Laetoli] footprints that might have beenmade today . . . with toe impressions and all."

—Mary Leakey, letter (1978)

in her own right, as a more patient and dating to 3.6 million years ago. "Nowthorough excavator than Louis ever this is really something to put on thewould be. Meanwhile, Louis was always mantelpiece," she once remarked ofproposing new theories of human ori- a particularly nice footprint. Thisgins and surrounding himself with con- remarkable discovery was the capstonetroversy, notably over an alleged early of an archaeological career as illustrioushuman site at Calico Hills, California, as that of her husband. She left Oldu-which a panel of experts declared to be vai Gorge for the last time in 1983,of natural origin rather than of human retired in Nairobi, was honored withmanufacture. He was also becoming honorary degrees by many universities,interested in research into living pri- and died in 1996.mates, sponsoring a number of soon-to-be-well-known researchers, amongthem Jane Goodall, who workedamong chimpanzees in Tanzania, andDian Fossey, who became world famousfor her research on mountain gorillas.

Louis's health deteriorated in the F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

late 1960s. He died in London in 1972, Colej Sonia. Leakey's Luck. London:just as his son Richard was achieving Collins, 1975.international fame with new hominidi. . . . _ , , Morell, Virginia. Ancestral Passions. New

discoveries in the bast Turkana area or ., , _. _ 01 .nncYork: Simon & bchuster, 1995.northern Kenya. Meanwhile, Mary qui-etly worked on the Olduvai artifacts Poynter, Margaret. The Leakeys: Uncover-and opened excavations at Laetoli in inS the Origins of Humankind. BerkeleyTanzania in 1977. Here she amazed HeiShts> NJ" Enslow> 1997'the world with the discovery of a trail Willis> DeHa> The Leflj^ pamiiy. loafersof footprints left by two hominids in the Search for Human Origins. New York:preserved in hardened volcanic ash Facts on File, 1992.


ylada

GrahameClark

S U R V E Y O R OFA N C I E N T E C O N O M I E SA N D E C O L O G Y

J ohn Douglas Grahame Clark drove cars withapparently reckless unconcern, talking aboutarchaeology while driving along country roadsat more than 60 miles (90 kilometers) an hour.He had a relentless curiosity about the humanpast and such a single-minded dedication to

archaeology that his students sometimes wondered whetherhe was a machine rather than a scholar. But underneath anaustere facade was a kind and gentle man.

Grahame Clark became interested in archaeology as ateenager, when a neighbor showed him a collection of stonearrowheads. By the end of his long life he had become oneof the 20th century's most successful archaeologists. The sonof a stockbroker, he was born in 1907. His father died ofinfluenza at the end of World War I, a loss that affectedyoung Grahame severely. For the rest of his life, heremained a shy and reticent man who seemed aloof, whenin fact he was a kindly person.

Here working at Mortimer Wheeler's Maiden Castle excavationas a student, Grahame Clark became a leading expert in classifi-cation and dating prehistoric cultures.

G R A H A M E C L A R K • 1 5 30

As a professor at Cambridge University,Grahame Clark created one of the leadingarchaeologist departments attracting stu-dents from all over the world. Here inMay, 1964, Clark examines the stratificationat Fromm's Landing, Australia, where oneof his students, John Mulvaney did exten-sive work looking at Australian prehistory.

In 1920, he went to MarlboroughCollege, a well-known English privateschool that encouraged both academicstudy and broader interests. Clarkbecame interested first in butterflies,then in archaeology. He started collect-ing stone tools when at home in south-ern England, which led to developing aserious interest in the prehistoric past atschool. In 1926

he went to Peterhouse, a CambridgeUniversity college, to study history.After two years of history, he transferredinto the newly founded Archaeologyand Anthropology degree program andgraduated with honors in 1930.

Peterhouse immediately awardedClark a three-year research fellowship,which he devoted to a study of BritishMesolithic (Middle Stone Age) cul-tures. These prehistoric societies werestill little known except for dozens ofsmall collections of stone tools. Clarkpublished The Mesolithic Age in Britainin 1932, a book which earned himwide praise and his doctorate a yearlater. In 1935 he was appointed anAssistant Lecturer in Archaeology atCambridge. He was to spend his entirecareer at the university.

The Mesolithic Age established Gra-hame Clark as an expert in the classifi-cation and dating of prehistoric cul-tures. His university duties left him freeto excavate during the summers, usingskills he had learned working on IronAge hill forts in southern England. Henow expanded his work in two direc-tions. While writing The Mesolithic Age,he became a founding member of theFenland Research Committee, a groupof scholars from several disciplines whocollaborated on studies of the ecology ofthe waterlogged fen (swamplike) coun-try around Cambridge.

Clark worked closely with HarryGodwin, a young botanist who was anexpert in the study of fossil pollengrains found in prehistoric swamps.The tiny pollens had fallen into thelayers of the swamp over many thou-sands of years. Fortunately, plant pol-lens are easy to recognize under amicroscope. Often, dramatic changescan be traced in vegetation around theswamp over long periods of time. Theirgreatest research was an excavation at


Peacock's Farm near Cambridge in1934, where they discovered Mesolithicflint tools in peat dated to about 6500BC, a first for Britain.

The fenland research made Clarkhighly conscious of the importanceof reconstructing ancient environ-ments and the ways in which ancientpeople adapted to changing ecologi-cal conditions. However, 10 years wereto pass before he excavated a water-logged Mesolithic site which containedabundant wooden artifacts and otherperishable artifacts. He visited Scandi-navia several times to see waterloggedsettlements dating to 5000 BC and ear-lier that the Danes had excavated. Helooked with envy at their fiber fishnets,wooden arrows, antler spearheads, andtheir exotic artworks, and wished hecould find them in Britain. After twoyears of traveling in the north of thecontinent, he published his secondbook, The Mesolithic Settlement ofNorthern Europe (1936). This was amasterly survey of the first settlementof northern Europe by humans afterthe Ice Age. It described not only theStone Age cultures, but also the envi-ronmental changes that formed thebackdrop to human life in the region.The Mesolithic Settlement soon became aclassic, and a basic textbook on thesubject for a generation.

By the outbreak of World War II in1938, Grahame Clark was regarded asone of the rising stars of his archaeolog-ical generation. He had written a popu-lar textbook, Archaeology and Society(1939), one of the first essays on theplace of archaeology in modern society.His first students were already workingin Africa and doing fundamentalresearch. His career was stopped shortby the war, which he spent like manyother archaeologists, in aerial photo-graphic interpretation. At the same

time, he devoted many hours to anintensive study of ancient economiclife, especially of the ways in whichpeople acquired food.

A stream of papers flowed from hispen during these years, many of them,as he recalled, written on the train ashe commuted to and from London.The first was on bees and ancient bee-keeping. It set the blueprint for a seriesof publications that covered suchdiverse topics as whaling and shiftingagriculture. In each he described thearchaeological evidence from Europe,then bolstered it with analogies takenfrom European folk culture. Soonafter the war he made a long journeythrough Norway, in which he observedScandinavian fishing families still usingthe same artifacts as prehistoric fishers.All these papers culminated in one ofClark's greatest books, PrehistoricEurope: the Economic Basis (1952). In ithe described ancient European soci-eties: how prehistoric people hadhunted animals, gathered plant foods,fished, and farmed—made their livingsin different ways through time—as away of convincing his colleagues thatthere was more to prehistoric Europethan just potsherds and stone artifacts.The book was, he said, "essentially anact of propaganda."

While writing Prehistoric Europe,Clark was also engaged on his greatestexcavation. In 1947 an amateurarchaeologist found some Mesolithicstone tools and antler fragments at StarCarr in northeastern England. Clarkrealized at once that this might be thewaterlogged site with well-preservedartifacts he was looking for, and exca-vated there for three seasons between1949 and 1951. Working with studentsand a minute budget, he recovered asmall Stone Age hunting site withalmost perfect preservation. The site

GrahameClarkBORN

July 28, 1907Bromley, Kent, England

DIED

September 12, 1995Cambridge, England

EDUCATION

Peterhouse College, Cambridge(B.A. 1930, M.A. 1933, Ph.D. 1934)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Pioneered in studying the effects ofancient ecology and environmentalchange on prehistoric economic life;excavated the Star Carr Mesolithicsite; published the first prehistoryof humankind based on radiocarbondating. Wrote The Mesolithic Agein Britain (1932); The Mesolithic Set-tlement of Northern Europe (1936);Archaeology and Society (1939);Prehistoric Europe: The EconomicBasis (1952); Excavations at StarCarr (1954); World Prehistory (1961,1977); Archaeological Researchesin Retrospect (1974), Archaeologyat Cambridge and Beyond (1989).Awarded the Erasmus Prize in 1990for his work in bringing archaeologyto a broad audience.

G R A H A M E C L A R K • 1 5 5

as Australia came to Cambridge. The"If anyone were to ask me why I have spent my life studying faculty excavated sites in North AfricaPrehistory, I would only say that I have remained under and elsewhere. Between 1952 and his

7 . 77 r 7 • 1.1 i 7. 7 7 retirement in 1974, Clark and his col-the speU of a subject which seeks to discover how we became leagues trained a generation of young

human beings endowed with minds and souk before we had archaeologists who went out to worklearned to write " in distant ^ands—Africa, Australia,

New Zealand, southwestern Asia, and

—Grahame Clark, in Archaeological Researches in the ^mefcas-, . He also began to travel widely, a s a

KetrOSpeCt \ 1 y l*\) result of which he wrote one of hisbest'known volumes, World Prehistory,which appeared in 1961. This was the

was centered on a crude birchwood first synthesis of human prehistoryplatform set in the reeds at an edge of a that relied on radiocarbon dating; itlong-vanished glacial lake. Harry God- attracted wide attention and went intowin used pollen grains to reconstruct three editions, the last in 1977.the vegetation that once surrounded After his retirement, Clark contin-Star Carr. ued to travel. He also wrote a stream

Clark himself described a Stone of books, the best known of which isAge hunting society whose artifacts Archaeology at Cambridge and Beyondbore some similarity to those of the (1989), an account of the CambridgeMaglemose culture across the North archaeology department and of itsSea. He also obtained a radiocarbon involvement in world prehistory. Hedate of 7538 BC, ±350 years, for Star also became Master of Peterhouse, hisCarr, one of the first carbon dates for a Cambridge college, an appointmentStone Age archaeological site ever that gave him great satisfaction. Theprocessed. In his Excavations at Star culminating moment of his career cameCarr (1954), Clark set a small Stone in 1990 when he was awarded the pres-Age site in a remarkably precise envi- tigious Erasmus Prize for his contribu-ronmental context, as vivid a piece of tions to making prehistory known toarchaeological reporting as any in the a wide audience. This perhaps was20th century. Fifty years later, a team of Clark's greatest achievement, but heexperts applied the latest archaeologi- is also remembered as one of thecal and environmental methods to Star outstanding pioneers of ecologicalCarr and proved the essential accuracy archaeology, the study of how humansof Clark's findings. adapted to changing environments.

In 1952 Grahame Clark was Few scholars leave such a lastingappointed Disney Professor of Archae- impact on their field of study,ology at Cambridge, following DorothyGarrod in the position. Although hewas too shy to make a notable teacherand was uncomfortable with universityadministration, he threw himself into F U R T H E R R E A D I N G

creating an archaeology department Fagan> Brian M Grahame Clark: An Intel-devoted to the study of world archaeol- Actual Biography of an Archaeologist. Boul-ogy. Many students from as far afield der, Colo.: Westview, 2001.


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JohnDesmondClark

A U T H O R I T Y OFA F R I C A N P R E H I S T O R Y

useum director, researcher, and distin-guished professor, John Desmond Clarkwas remarkable for his keen archaeologi-cal eye. In 1938 he picked up half of asmall, 40,000-year-old stone scraping

tool at an archaeological site in the Zambezi Valley. In1959, he returned to the same site and promptly recognizedthe other half lying on the ground. Back at his museum, hereunited them for the first time in 40,000 years.

Clark was born in London in 1916, and entered Christ'sCollege, Cambridge to study history in 1933. He was alreadyinterested in archaeology, thanks to a teacher at school. AtCambridge he studied Stone Age archaeology under Gra-hame Clark and learned excavation under Mortimer Wheelerat Iron Age hill fort at Maiden Castle in southern England.After graduation in 1937, he applied for three museum postsin England but was unsuccessful. Fortunately for Africanarchaeology, he received a three-year appointment asadministrator of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Living-stone, close to the Victoria Falls in Northern Rhodesia (nowZambia). He was also appointed Curator of the Rhodes-Livingstone Museum, then housed in an old clubhouse.

From left to right, Desmond Clark Mary Leakey, and jack Harrisat the hominid footprint site of Laetoli.Tanzania, in 1978.

J O H N D E S M O N D C L A R K • 1 5 7

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Desmond Clark arrived in Living- established the Northern RhodesiarOT me, It nOS UCCTl ITl part stone in 1938 accompanied by his new National Monuments Commission to

the CX.citCYnCTlt of learning w^e Betty, wno had a profound influ- administer archaeological and historic7 IT ence on his career- He was one of the sites in the country. He was also aston-

VflOre aDOUt the human past yery few profeSSi0nal archaeologists ishingly productive in the field, publish-

hi the Continent Where it working in southern Africa at the time, ing The Stone Age Cultures of Northern

flR \)PV(Y(\ thp fxhil/lTfltinn anc^ a^most nothing was known of the Rhodesia in 1950, at the time a fine, j. j . prehistoric societies of the region. His model of river valley archaeological

OJ UlSCOVery Cmu excavation fjrst task was to set Up ancj organize a study. His travels took him throughout

of new sites for their proper museum, which he completed the country and resulted in the discov-_.£ ^.' _ r r^,. „ by the end of 1939. He also collabo- ery in 1953 of the now famous Kalamboconfirmation o f wnat w e - , . 1 1 0 1 c u e A i _ . i _ i . i

7 7 i rated with a young geologist, Basil rails otone Age site, which lies on thealready knOW Or for what Cook, on a study of the geology, prehis- Zambia-Tanzania border.

they Can add tO it and the tor*c stone tools, and fossil animal Until Kalambo Falls, Clark wast . r 11 . 7 bones from the ancient gravels of the regarded as a competent archaeologist

Sheer ]Oy OJ Walking and Zambezi River upstream of the Victoria working in a remote backwater of theWOrldng in a part Of the Falls. This was Clark's first indepen- world. His work had local interest, but

Wfyrld that /1/1S not reall^ ^ent fieldwork, followed by an impor- little more. Kalambo Falls changed all7 j 77 7 L » tant excavation into the occupation that. In a series of meticulous field sea-

Cnanged all that mUCh. deposits of Mumbwa Cave in the cen- sons between 1956 and 1959, he exca-tral part of the country. With these vated a long sequence of layers showing

1. Desmond Clark in excavations, he began to put together cultural change, including several EarlyThe P/icfm/Ycfvorc (1 ORO^ tne ^rst secluence of prehistoric soci- Stone Age living surfaces, where fineX / W^ x Cto Li' LCio Lo i ^ V JL ^ \D^ J . , i -p!-i f . 11 i r 1 1 • 1

eties m northern Rhodesia. hand axes used for butchering game layDuring World War II Clark served where they had been used over 230,000

as a sergeant in an ambulance unit in years ago. The site, just upstream of aEthiopia and what was then British spectacular waterfall, also containedSomaliland. He took advantage of extensive Middle Stone Age occupa-every opportunity to collect Stone Age tions, and a important early metalartifacts from river gravels, open sites, workers' settlement of the first millen-and rock shelters. After service in nium AD. The Kalambo excavationsMadagascar and Kenya, he was posted involved scholars from other disciplinesto Somalia as a Civil Affairs Officer, a who studied the geology and ancientjob that involved much travel. He environments, and many young archae-made extensive archaeological collec- ologists who went on to become distin-tions, enough material for him to write guished excavators in their own right,what is still an authoritative book on The Kalambo excavations unfoldedthe archaeology of the region, Prehis- at a time of great interest in Africa andtoric Cultures of the Horn of Africa, pub- early human evolution overseas, whichlished in 1954- This provided the first brought a flood of American scholarsdescription of what had happened in to Central Africa. Clark became anprehistoric times in northeast Africa. international figure. With his openHalf a century later, we know that manner, intense curiosity and enthusi-Ethiopia was home to some of the ear- asm, and constant encouragementliest humans in the world. of less experienced fieldworkers, he

Back in Livingstone, Clark planned became a much-loved mentor of youngi and built a new building for the Rhodes- archaeologists from many parts of the

Livingstone Museum in 1951 and also world. His academic interests widened


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significantly, especially with the pub-lication of his Prehistory of SouthernAfrica (1959), an engaging and stillquoted synthesis of the subject. He wasa whirlwind of new projects, includingone to survey the archaeological sites ofthe Middle Zambezi Valley before thisremote area was flooded by the risingwaters of human-created Lake Kariba.

In 1961 Clark was invited tobecome a Professor of Anthropology atthe University of California, Berkeley,where an important multidisciplinarygroup of African scholars was formed.This was a fortunate move both forClark and for African archaeology,coming as it did two years after theLeakeys found Zinjanthropus boisei atOlduvai Gorge, Tanzania. The ampleresearch funds available in the UnitedStates allowed Clark to expand hisresearches dramatically without thedistractions of running a major museum.With the assistance of others, includingthe young paleoanthropologist GlynnIsaac, he trained not only a generationof American graduate students, butalso more than 10 Africans who arenow important figures in archaeologyand antiquities administration in theirown countries.

Clark's own interests now focusedmore on very early human evolution.His 1960s excavations extended fromZambia to neighboring Malawi, wherehe searched for evidence of very earlyhominids, without much success exceptfor the discovery of an elephant thatwas surrounded by the stone tools usedto butcher it. He also worked with mul-tidisciplinary teams on Stone Age sitesin the heart of the Sahara Desert and,in 1971, along the Upper Nile in theSudan, where he searched for earlyfarming villages.

The year 1974 saw Clark workingextensively in Ethiopia, excavating a75,000-year-old Middle Stone Age

cave in the Ethiopian Rift, and StoneAge camps dating to about 1.5 millionyears ago at over 7,800 feet (2,400meters) above sea level. Unfortunately,a deteriorating political situation madeit impossible for him to work in thehuman fossil-rich Awash region, whichhe had planned to do in the 1980s.Africa was in such turmoil that Clarkturned his attention to research pro-jects in China and India, where heexcavated early Stone Age sites.

Clark retired from teaching in1986, but continued to carry out activefieldwork in China until the 1990s.He continued active research untilhis death in 2002. He remained theparagon of African archaeology. Alwayscautious and conservative in his inter-pretations, Clark had more firsthandknowledge of the prehistory of Africathan any person living. His boundlessenthusiasm for archaeology broughtdozens of young archaeologists intoAfrica and the study of early humanevolution. He encouraged new meth-ods for teasing information from stonetools, food remains, and environmentaldata. Few archaeologists worked in somany places and with such sustainedeffort as Desmond Clark. His influenceon African archaeology will continueto be felt well into the 21st century.

FURTHER READING

Daniel, Glyh and Christopher Chippen-dale, eds. The Postmaster: Eleven ModemPioneers of Archaeology. London: Thamesand Hudson, 1989.

Murray, Tim, ed. Encyclopedia of Archaeol-ogy: The Great Archaeologists. Santa Bar-bara, Calif: ABC-Clio, 1999.

JohnDesmondClarkBORNApril 10, 1916London, England

DIEDFebruary 14, 2002Oakland, California

EDUCATIONChrist's College, Cambridge(B.A. 1936, M.A. 1940, Ph.D. 1950)

ACCOMPLISHMENTSConsidered to be the leading20th-century African prehistorian;carried out major researches inZambezi Valley in Central Africa,Somalia, and Ethiopia before 1950;excavated Kalambo Falls site, trans-forming modern knowledge of EarlyStone Age societies in CentralAfrica; made major contributions tothe study of early human evolution,trained Africans to serve as archae-ologists in their own countries.Wrote The Stone Age Cultures ofNorthern Rhodesia (1950); Prehis-toric Cultures of the Horn of Africa,(1954); The Prehistory of SouthernAfrica (1959), The Kalambo FallsPrehistoric Site (1969, 1974, 2001).

J O H N D E S M O N D C L A R K • 1 5 9 ^^^H

Gordon R.Willey

M A S T E R OF MAYANA R C H A E O L O G Y

he genial Gordon Willey was a mentor andarchaeological father to generations ofyoung archaeologists. He was also a talentedauthor of detective stories. Gordon Willeywas born in Chariton, Iowa, in 1913, but

grew up in Long Beach, California. After taking an under-graduate degree in archaeology at the University of Ari-zona, Tucson, in 1933, he took a master's degree in 1935.Willey studied under archaeologist Duncan Strong atColumbia University and earned a doctorate in Peruvianarchaeology in 1942. While still a graduate student, Willeyand his colleague Richard Woodbury carried out a majorarchaeological survey of sites along the northwestern coastof Florida between Pensacola and St. Marks. They found87 sites, excavated six of them, and used their research todevelop a regional chronology so important that it is stillconsulted today.

In 1943 Willey was appointed to the Smithsonian Insti-tution in Washington D.C., to help the anthropologistJulian Steward edit the monumental Handbook of SouthAmerican Indians. He came under the intellectual influenceof Steward, a gifted fieldworker who had studied ShoshoneIndian hunter-gatherers in the Great Basin of the westernUnited States. These people lived in small groups andranged widely over large home territories. Steward had pro-claimed that archaeologists should spend less time looking atsingle sites and look at them set in their landscapes as thesechanged over time.

After World War II, Willey applied Steward's settlementand landscape approach to the Viru Valley on Peru's NorthCoast. There he studied an entire river valley's changing set-tlements through more than 1,500 years of prehistoric time,using aerial photography, surveying on foot, and limitedexcavations. Willey believed one could not study ancientsocieties without looking at them as part of complex eco-nomic, political, and social landscapes. The Viru research,published in 1953, helped found a new field of settlementarchaeology in the 1950s and 1960s, which was based onlarge-scale archaeological surveys of such areas as the Valleyof Mexico before Aztec civilization, ancient Nubia (Sudan),and Mesopotamia.

On the strength of his Viru research, Willey was appointedthe Bowditch Professor of Central American Archaeologyand Ethnology at Harvard University in 1950, a post heheld for the remainder of his career. He was already workingon a series of publications with his colleague Philip Phillips,identifying the economic and technological factors thatdistinguished hunters and gatherers from farmers. In their


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Gordon Willey records data in a survey pit during the Belize Valley project of 1953-56.Willey's Belize research focused as much on site survey as on excavation. By looking atentire areas such as the Belize Valley, he was able to study changing Maya life over manycenturies against a consistent landscape.

classic book, Method and Theory inAmerican Archaeology, published in1958, they argued that ancient Ameri-can societies had changed through longperiods of time as a result of a multi-tude of interacting factors, among themenvironmental change, populationgrowth, and group and individual iden-tities. Willey and Phillips argued thatAmerican archaeology had close ties toanthropology: it is "anthropology or itis nothing." This close marriagebetween anthropology and archaeologyhas become one of the cornerstones ofAmerican archaeology.

Gordon Willey either directed orcarried out fieldwork in eight countriesduring his long career. The Bowditchprofessorship at Harvard carried theexpectation that the holder would workin Central America, specifically onMaya civilization. Willey was appointedto the post on the basis of his generalarchaeological experience, having pre-viously been only one season in Panama.He spent 1952 and 1953 working onshell middens in that country, but his

Bowditch predecessor, Alfred M. Tozzer,soon made it clear to him that he wassupposed to work on the Maya.

Willey felt somewhat intimidatedby the presence of Alfred Kidder, J. EricThompson, and other eminent archae-ologists working on the subject. So hebegan with a settlement survey at Bar-ton Ramie in the Belize River Valley.Here, farmers had cleared the forest fortheir fields, so Willey and his studentswere able to walk freely across the land-scape. Willey spotted some promisinghouse mounds in 1953 and returned ayear later for a larger-scale survey. Theresult was one of the first Maya settle-ment patterns ever to be mapped.

Willey expanded his settlementresearches to other sites, first at Altarde Sacrificios in Guatemala's Petenin 1959, where a Maya ceremonial cen-ter lay on an island in a swamp. Theforest cover was thick and the surveyyielded few house mounds. So the teammoved to Seibal farther upstream onthe Pasion River, where the ceremonialcenter lay on higher, better drained

GordonR.WffleyBORN

March 7, 1913Chariton, Iowa

DIED

April, 28, 2002Cambridge, Massachusetts

EDUCATION

University of Arizona (B.A. 1933,M.A. 1935); Columbia University(Ph.D. 1942)

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Pioneered systematic use of archae-ological survey in North America,the Maya lowlands, and coastalPeru; carried out large-scale investi-gations in river basins in the south-eastern United States and a pioneersettlement survey in the Viru Val-ley, Peru; introduced settlementarchaeology to the study of Mayacivilization with notable researchesat Barton Ramie, Belize, Seibal,Guatemala, and Copan, Honduras.Wrote Archaeology of the Florida,Gulf Coast (1949); Method and The-ory in American Archaeology (withPhilip Phillips, 1958); PrehistoricSettlement Patterns in the Viru Valley,Peru (1953); An Introduction toAmerican Archaeology (1966, 1971),A History of American Archaeology(with Jeremy A. Sabloff, 1974).

G O R D O N R . W I L L E Y • 1 6 1

ground. Willey laid out a 3-mile-by-3- became a classic, laying the founda-"There is an Unavoidable mile (5-kilometers-by-5-kilometers) tions for new generations of field

tension in archaeological square, which he surveyed intensively research throughout the Americas.7 . 7 while training a generation of now dis- Today it is largely outdated, in consid-

research, a tension between tinguished Maya archaeologists. By the erable part because of the fine training

the material remains We Study time the fieldwork at Altar de Sacrifi- Willey gave his students. Willey wasand our /affpmftfc fn or/rch c^os anc^ Seibal ended in 1968, Willey also co-author of A History of Americanill ILL UlAl ClLU^/JlL'lo (AJ FiUoL', . j j j had rounded a new tradition in Maya Archaeology with his former student

the idzOS that Once Created, archaeology. In all his researches, the Jeremy A. Sabloff in 1974, a book

shabed and arranged these focus of the surveys and excavations widely used in college classrooms.

r^m/nti « TJWc ic n ten <nnn was not only on the city itself' but on Gordon Willey spent much of his• t^ I / LCvi' / lo * -LI t t j to CC LCS / to C'L/I L •> i . *« 11* 11* 1 1 • • 1

the outlying areas as well, on the hier- career developing culture histories andthe archO£OlOglSt ITlUSt learn archy of lesser settlements that flour- supervising studies of entire ancient

tO live with as he S^OeS about ished in the shadow of the larger landscapes. His later career unfolded7 . » centers. His successors carry on the during the theoretical ferments that

J o ' tradition. Such settlement research enveloped archaeology in the 1960scontinues to be a major part of Maya j (see Part 5), many of which revolved

CjOrdon I\. Vv illCy ill archaeology. The result is a much bet- around the need to explain rather thanT"/!/3 P/Kfrn/Kf/TS (1 Q89^ ter understanding °fthe changing for- describe the past. Willey himself urged

tunes of individual Maya centers. caution, for he was wary of attemptsWilley next moved on to Hon- to explain the creative ideas that once

duras where, in 1975, he was invited by lay behind the material remains foundthe Honduran government to carry out by the archaeologist. Therein laya settlement survey around the great his greatest contribution, for WilleyMaya city of Copan, first investigated trained an entire generation of Mayaby John Lloyd Stephens in 1839. He archaeologists and others whose workjdirected the first two years of the sur- was based firmly in descriptive archae-Ivey, from 1975 to 1977, which was ology and settlement studies. At thethen continued by Claude Baudez and same time, the new generation, taughtWilliam Sanders with a Pennsylvania by Willey that solid data are the basisState University team. Years of meticu- for sound theoretical reasoning aboutlous survey have produced an unrivaled the past, has embarked on carefulchronicle of the rise and fall of one of searches for explanations of such phe-the greatest of all Maya cities. nomena as the collapse of classic Maya

Even while directing these large civilization in AD 900. Willey himselffield surveys, Willey was busy writing carried his detective skills into retire-up not only his fieldwork, but also ment and was the author of severalengaged in compiling a massive sum- excellent crime novels before his deathmary of the archaeology of the Ameri- in 2002.cas, the first ever attempted. He sur-veyed North and Central America inm / ^ j c U A 1071 A F U R T H E R R E A D I N G1966, and south America in 1971. AnIntroduction to American Archaeology Daniel, Glyn, and Christopher Chippin-(1966-1971) drew on Willey's broad dale, "Gordon R. Willey," in The Postmas-field experience and lifetime of archae- ters. London: Thames and Hudson, 1989.ological study, as well as using the prin- w c -7 J D - U J \ ^ T ui5 y' & F Vogt, Evan Z., and Richard M. Leventhal,ciples of culture history he had outlined eds preustoric Settlement Patterns: Essays inwith Philip Phillips in 1958. This Honor of Gordon R. Wilky. Albuquerque:magisterial, two-volume work rapidly University of New Mexico Press, 1983.


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dward H. Thompson (1860-1935) was aMaya archaeologist who investigated themysterious Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza inMexico's Yucatan region. Thompson recov-ered numerous gold offerings and figurines

from the dark waters, using primitive diving technology.O. G. S. Crawford (1886-1957) was a British archaeol-

ogist who pioneered landscape archaeology and archaeologi-cal survey. He was also an early user of aerial photographs toidentify and study archaeological sites from the air. Crawfordfounded Antiquity in 1927, an archaeological journal with aninternational perspective still widely read today.

Gerhard Bersu (1889-1964), a German archaeologist,worked extensively in southern Britain. Bersu developedmeticulous excavation methods for studying prehistoricdwellings, notably at the Little Woodbury Iron Age villageof the first millennium BC. He also worked in Ireland and onthe Isle of Man.

Li Chi (1895-1979) was the "father of modern Chi-nese archaeology." Trained in anthropology at Harvard Uni-versity, he was responsible for the excavation of an earlyfarming village at Yangshao in northern China, the first digby a Chinese scholar. His most famous excavations investi-gated the Shang civilization capital at Anyang on theHwang Ho (Yellow River) during the 1930s. Li Chi spenthis later career in Taiwan.

Edward H.Thompson's 1890 office was once a palace room atthe Maya site of Labna, Yucatan, Mexico. Like other early archae-ologists, Thompson used temples and other ancient buildings aslaboratories and living space.

M O R E A R C H A E O L O G I S T S T O R E M E M B E R • 1 6 3

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William Albright (1891-1971) Snaketown in Arizona achieved world' available for study from early farmingworked in southwestern Asia for his wide fame. settlements.entire career. He was a pioneer of Christopher Hawkes (1905-92) Aleksei Pavlovich Okladnikovstratigraphic and biblical archaeology. was a British archaeologist responsible (b. 1908), a Soviet archaeologist ofHis Archaeology of Palestine (1949) was for detailed classifications and dating great distinction, achieved intema-for a long time a classic work. of Bronze Age and Iron Age societies. tional fame for his excavations in Mon-

Raymond Dart (1893-1988) As a professor of European archaeology golia and northeastern Asia. He discov-achieved world fame for his discovery at Oxford University, he did much ered the well-known, 21,000-year-oldof the southern ape-human Australop- to integrate British prehistoric cul- Stone Age hunting camp at Mal'ta onithecus africanus at Taung, South Africa tures with their contemporaries on Lake Baikal, and the Neanderthal buri-in 1924. Dart claimed the fossil was a the continent. als at Teshik-Tash cave in the Crimea,human ancestor, but this was rejected James B. Griffin (1905-97), was which date to over 50,000 years ago.by the wider scientific community until the leading authority on the archaeol- Tatiana Proskouriakoffthe 1950s, when he was vindicated by ogy of eastern North America for over (1909-85) was a brilliant artist who isother discoveries. 40 years. He was an expert on artifact still remembered for her meticulous

J. Eric Thompson (1898-1975) styles, especially pottery, and devel- artistic reconstructions of Maya citieswas a British Maya archaeologist who oped classification schemes for the and monuments. She also made seriousexercised a strong influence on the region that are still in use today. Grif- contributions to the decipherment ofdecipherment of Mayan writing. His fin also studied relationships between Mayan script with her work on thestrongly expressed belief that the Maya eastern North America and neighbor- royal stelae at the Maya center ofrulers were peaceful astrologer priests ing regions like the Great Plains and Yaxchilan.obsessed with calendars and the passage the St. Lawrence Valley. He trained Jesse D. Jennings (1909-97),of time held back decipherment for a several generations of now well- professor of anthropology at the Uni-considerable time. In fact, the script known archaeologists. versity of Utah, Salt Lake City, was awas phonetic and the Maya rulers were Robert Braidwood (b. 1907) dominant figure in the study of Greatwarlike, ambitious lords with little professor of anthropology at the Uni- Basin archaeology. Jennings excavatedrespect for human life. versity of Chicago, pioneered multidis- Danger Cave in Utah, which con-

William Duncan Strong (1899- ciplinary research into the origins of tained evidence of thousands of years1962) was a self-trained archaeologist. food production in the Near East dur- of human occupation, and was a pio-During his two years as professor of ing the 1950s. His best known excava- neer in salvage archaeology, carried outanthropology at the University of tion was of the early farming village before the construction of major dams.Nebraska from 1929 to 1931, Strong at Jarmo in northern Iraq in 1959 and He also worked in the Pacific area,revolutionized the archaeology of the 1960, which produced radiocarbon Xia Nai (1910-85), of the Insti-Great Plains by investigating settled dates earlier than 6000 BC, a sensa- tute of Archaeology of the Chineseagricultural villages. He used anthropo- tional reading at the time. Academy of Sciences, learned excava-logical sources to do so, working back Eric Higgs (1908-76) was a sheep tion under Mortimer Wheeler atfrom the present into the past. In farmer who became an archaeologist in Maiden Castle, England. He investi-1937 he became professor of anthro- his 50s. After training at Cambridge gated numerous Chinese sites, amongpology at Columbia University, where University, he headed a major project them the Shang civilization's city ofhe trained many later well-known on the origins of agriculture in the Erligang on the Hwang Ho (Yellowarchaeologists. His later career was early 1970s, making use of innovative River). He also excavated the earlyspent in Peruvian archaeology. approaches such as studies of the sur- farming village at Banpo, which dates

Emil Haury (1904-92) was roundings of ancient settlements and to about 4000 BC. Xia trained hundredsan expert in the archaeology of the flotation methods for recovering seeds of archaeologists during his long career.American Southwest, and professor from archaeological levels. Flotation, Stuart Piggott (1910-96), anof anthropology at the University which involves passing soil samples expert on Stone Age farming culturesof Arizona, Tucson. He defined the through fine screens and water, has rev- and European prehistory, was the firstwell-known Hohokam culture of the olutionized the study of early agricul- archaeologist to develop a classificationsouthern desert. His excavations at ture by multiplying the number of seeds of Neolithic pottery in Britain. His


Ancient Europe (1965) was an elegantsummary of European prehistory. Pig-gott was also the biographer of WilliamStukeley and an expert on the Druids,ancient British priests described byJulius Caesar.

Walter W.Taylor (1913-97)achieved fame and notoriety for hisStudy of Archaeology, published in 1955.This book was a scathing critique ofNorth American archaeology as prac-ticed at the time and was widely con-sidered to be a personal attack on emi-nent colleagues. Taylor claimed thatarchaeologists of the day were littlemore than technicians, and advocatedmultidisciplinary research in field andlaboratory. In this he was a decadeahead of Lewis Binford's "new archae-ology" (see Part 5).

Charles McBurney (1914-79)was a Stone Age archaeologist bestknown for his excavations at the HauaFteah in what is now Libya. He alsoworked on Le Cotte de St. Breladecave on the island of Jersey in the Eng-lish Channel.

Thurstan Shaw (b. 1914), adistinguished African archaeologist,worked on the Later Iron Age societiesof West Africa. A meticulous field-worker, Shaw excavated the remarkableroyal burials of the 9th century AD atIgbo Ukwo in Nigeria and wrote amonograph on the spectacular bronzeartifacts and other finds. His Nigeria:Its Archaeology and Early History (1978)is a classic work. He also founded thedepartment of archaeology in Nigeria'sUniversity of Ibadan, a major center forarchaeological training in Africa.

Robert Heizer (1915-79) was aNorth American archaeologist whospecialized in the archaeology of Cali-fornia and the desert West. He was alsoan expert on modern Native Americangroups. He excavated numerous sitesduring his long career, including Love-lock Cave in Nevada, uncovering a

long chronicle of Great Basin occupa-tion. Heizer was also a pioneer of eco-nomic archaeology and the study ofearly life ways.

John Rowe (b. 1918), professorof anthropology at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, carried out pio-neer researches on the Inca of highlandPeru and their ancient capital atCuzco. His Introduction to the Archaeol-ogy ofCuzco (1944) remains a defini-tive account of Inca civilization.

Francois Bordes (1919-81)became famous for his excavations inFrench late Ice Age caves. He was anexpert on the classification of stonetools who developed elaborate methodsfor doing so that are still in use today.

Marion White (1921-75) spenther career working in western NewYork State. She was the first woman toearn a Ph.D. in anthropology from theUniversity of Michigan (1956) andsubsequently joined the faculty at theState University of New York, Buffalo.White developed an extraordinarydatabase of archaeological sites and col-lections from western New York. Shewas also a pioneer of salvage archaeol-ogy, carried out in advance of road con-struction and dam projects.

Raymond Dart (far left) with his ardentsupporter Robert Broom, French prehis-torian Abbe Henri Breuil, and SouthAfrican archaeologist C.Van Riet Loweexamine the skull of Australopithecusafricanus which Dart discovered in 1924.

M O R E A R C H A E O L O G I S T S TO R E M E M B E R • 165

Charles Higham (center), with graduate students Beatrice Hudson (left) and Famaanu Mualia, excavates the prehistoric site of BanNon Wat,Thailand, in February 2002. Here they have uncovered a unique Neolithic jar burial dating from about 2000 BC.


Team Players

Until the 1960s, the world of archaeology was a small one. Theentire population of professional archaeologists was never more thanabout 2,000. Most of them worked alone, or nearly alone, makingoften dramatic discoveries with almost no money at all. Even as late

as the early 1960s, it was possible to go out and find entire ancient societieswhose existence was completely unknown.

Then came the 1960s, and a massive population explosion of archaeologists.The individual excavator of earlier generations gave way to large and small fieldprojects involving teams of scientists, many of them nonarchaeologists. Forexample, in addition to one or more archaeologists, even a modest-sized excava-tion of a Stone Age hunting camp can now involve experts on ancient environ-ments, local geology and geomorphology, animal bones, soil science, and humanfossils—some of these experts have significant archaeological expertise as well.Almost all of today's archaeologists are specialists, either in a particular ancientsociety or some highly technical archaeological method. Generalists like FlindersPetrie or Louis Leakey are almost unknown.

In Part 5, we move from individual biographies to short portraits of still-living archaeologists who have had a profound influence on the subject or havemade important discoveries. Even these portraits are incomplete, for today'sarchaeological world is large, complex, and to a large extent anonymous. Forexample, 50 years ago, nearly everyone working on ancient Egypt knew oneanother. Today, many are strangers to one another.

The great growth in archaeology resulted from a combination of factors,including an expansion in university departments and graduate programs inarchaeology and the building of new museums. At least equally as important,there was a growing demand for archaeologists in colonial territories around theworld to run museums, staff antiquities services, and investigate the past. Theexpansion was rapid. For example, in 1960 there were about nine professionalarchaeologists working in Africa south of the Sahara Desert. Today there areover 100 in South Africa alone. Until the early 1960s most archaeologists con-centrated primarily on highly specific, detailed studies of artifacts of all kinds,and with dating the past by cross-comparison of bits of evidence. Archaeologywas by and large a descriptive activity—descriptions of artifacts, houses andother structures, and records and descriptions of the contents of stratigraphiclayers. Archaeologists were concerned not with patterns of human settlementor the ways people made their livings, but with objects. There were excep-tions, of course, notably Gordon Willey's Viru Valley survey in Peru, and Gra-hame Clark's Star Carr excavations in Britain, but they were few. Inevitably,

HASMUKH SAN KALI A

ROBERT MCADAMS

LEWIS BINFORD

JAMES DEETZ

HESTER DAVIS

STUART STRUEVER

ROGER GREEN

PATTY JO WATSON

GEORGE BASS

KENT FLANNERY

DAVID CLARK

GLYNN ISAAC

CHARLES HICHAM

COLIN RENFREW

LINDA SCHELE

DON JOHANSON

RICHARD LEAKEY

OLGA SOFFER

ZAHI HAWASS

MARGARET CONKEY

CHRIS DONNAN

JEAN CLOTTES

CLIVE GAMBLE

IAN HODDER

PATRICK KIRCH

DAVID LEWIS-WILLIAMS

IVOR NOEL HUME

5

T E A M P L A Y E R S • 1 6 7

a powerful reaction developed against the narrow approaches to the past that markedmost of archaeology. The reaction was fueled in part by the scientific developmentssuch as radiocarbon and potassium-argon methods that made dating very earlyhuman sites a matter of precision rather than educated guesswork, and by a greatlybroadened perspective on cultural development.

The 1960s were a time of dramatic social protest in many parts of the westernworld. These spilled over into archaeology in calls for a "new archaeology" based onformal scientific methods and approaches that stressed the complex relationshipsbetween ancient human societies and their natural environments. The new archae-ology was in large part the brainchild of Lewis Binford, who argued passionately fornew perspectives on archaeology that emphasized explanation and interpretation ofthe past in place of the descriptive approaches of earlier generations. His "processualapproach" placed an emphasis on the study of the processes of human culturalchange; it continues to dominate much archaeological thinking.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a new generation of fieldworkers, notably in CentralAmerica, who put many of the principles of processual archaeology into practice.University of Michigan archaeologist Kent Flannery led the way with important sur-veys and excavations in the Valley of Oaxaca, home of the ancient Zapotecs. He,with his wife Joyce Marcus and many students, carried out the fieldwork as a formof dialogue between more traditional approaches to archaeology and processualresearch. Simultaneously, a team of archaeologists from Pennsylvania State Univer-sity carried out a 10-year survey of the Valley of Mexico, plotting site distributionsand studying settlement changes in the millennia before the appearance of theAztec civilization.

Grahame Clark of Cambridge University and his colleagues trained a generationof young archaeologists to work overseas, in lands far from Europe. Clark's students,notably John Mulvaney, started the systematic study of Australian prehistory. CharlesHigham, another Cambridge product, has made a lifetime study of the archaeologyof southeast Asia and of the ancestry of the spectacular Angkor civilization of aboutAD 1100, which was located in present-day Cambodia. Many Cambridge studentsalso worked in tropical Africa, among them the paleoanthropologist Glynn Isaac,and John Parkington, a notable expert on late prehistoric hunter-gatherers in south-ern Africa.

The new archaeology in North America coincided with the expansion of jettravel around the world. Until the 1960s, contacts between American and Europeanarchaeologists were sporadic at best. Air travel allowed archaeologists to have face-to-face contact and helped facilitate debate and the exchange of ideas. The Britisharchaeologist David Clark was criticizing the current state of European archaeologyat the same time as Lewis Binford was advocating new theoretical approaches inNorth America. Also at the same time, young archaeologists like Colin Renfrewwere applying new high-technology methods to the past. Renfrew and some scientistcolleagues used the telltale trace elements in obsidian (volcanic glass), which varyfrom one source to another, to trace long-distance trade routes across the easternMediterranean as early as 6000 BC.

Computers, spectrometers, tree-ring calibration of radiocarbon dates, flotationmethods for recovering tiny seeds—these and other truly amazing technologicaladvances propelled archaeology into the late 20th century. As the number of archae-ologists increased greatly, so did their discoveries and the complexity of the data.The 1970s and 1980s saw major advances in the study of human origins, with newfossils dating back as far as 3.5 million years, notably the celebrated fossil in Ethiopiafound and named Lucy by paleoanthropologists Don Johanson and Tim White. The


discovery of Chinese emperor Qinshihuangdi's terra-cotta regiment was anotherhighlight, as was the excavation of a Bronze Age shipwreck at Uluburun off southernTurkey by George Bass and his colleagues. The late 1980s saw the discovery of theMoche Lords of Sipan on Peru's North Coast, gold-clad warrior priests whose richesrivaled those of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. By the 1980s, too, teams ofexperts, notably Linda Schele, had deciphered ancient Maya writing, a puzzle thathad mystified scholars for centuries. Now Maya archaeologists dig cities and templeswith translations of inscriptions to guide them.

Archaeology has truly come of age in the early 21st century, not only with a bat'tery of new scientific methods that allow us to identify the first domesticated seeds,or beetles found in house middens, but also with a new generation of theoreticalapproaches that extend the horizons of archaeology in new directions. The proces-sual archaeology of the 1960s and 1970s was concerned primarily with how humansocieties changed over time. But the concept and interpretation of these processes ofchange became more and more mechanical and impersonal to many people. A newgeneration of theory emerged, this time concerned with people, both as groups andindividuals, rather than process. These "post-processual" approaches focus on howpeople interact with one another, and with their natural and supernatural worlds, asthey do on cultural change. Examples include studies of male and female genderroles, and the reconstruction of sacred landscapes around such well-known sites asAvebury, Stonehenge, and the Maya city of Copan in Honduras. Increasingly, too,archaeology is becoming a multidisciplinary enterprise, where fieldworkers drawon experts from many other disciplines to solve specific problems. For example, anarchaeologist working on the origins of agriculture in southwestern Asia some12,000 years ago would rely on the expertise of botanists, climatologists, animalbone experts, and radiocarbon dating specialists, to mention only a few.

In recent decades archaeologists have invested more and more time in savingthe past for the future. The ravages of treasure hunters and looters, and a tidal waveof urban development, deep plowing, strip mining, and road construction, havedestroyed thousands of archaeological sites around the world. Increasingly, archaeo-logical discoveries have come from excavations carried out a few days ahead of bull-dozers on sites threatened with destruction. Increasingly, too, archaeologists havebecome concerned with conservation and management of archaeological sites andartifacts, for unlike many other resources, the fragile records of the human past arefinite. Once a site is destroyed, an artifact wrenched from its find spot, it is gone for-ever. Archaeological excavation, however scientific, is destruction, so recording andmanaging the past for the future is of overwhelming importance. Within anothergeneration, most archaeologists will be as much concerned with the conservationand management of archaeological sites as with actual discovery.

Today's archaeology is highly complex, very specialized, and concerned withevery period of human history, from our origins among East African primates some2.5 million years ago to historical neighborhoods in U.S. cities. Modern archaeolo-gists are students of the human past, and of human behavior in the broadest possiblesense; they are practitioners of a science that provides a unique and fascinating wayof studying the changes in human societies over very long periods of time.

Even a generation ago, archaeology was dominated by a few world-famous schol-ars whose discoveries often became household words. Today, archaeological excava-tions and surveys involve the teamwork of many scientists. Even modest discoveriesare the work of several archaeologists, and no one person dominates even a small areaof the field. For this reason, here are short biographies of archaeologists whose workhas wide influence, instead of longer profiles of only a handful of celebrated excavators.

T E A M P L A Y E R S • 1 6 9

SomeProminentArchaeologistsof Our Time

H^ H asmukh Sankalia (1908-89) was an^^™*™^B Indian archaeologist who learned excava-• H tion from Mortimer Wheeler and pio-H H neered the teaching of archaeology at

^JLa ^^^^ Deccan College, where he served asprofessor of proto-Indian and Indian history from 1939 to1973. Sankalia excavated both Stone Age and historicalsites throughout India. He did much to raise public con-sciousness of archaeology in India.

Robert McAdams (b. 1926), a Near Eastern archaeolo-gist, pioneered settlement surveys in Mesopotamia. In these,he traced the dramatic changes resulting from intensive irri-gation agriculture, then rising salt levels in the soil. Adamshas also made important contributions to the study of theorigins of civilization.

Lewis Binford (b. 1929) is arguably the most influentialarchaeologist of the 20th century. Binford developed newtheoretical approaches to archaeology in the 1960s thatadvocated more scientific approaches and an emphasis onhuman societies as constantly changing systems. This so-called new archaeology, described in his book In Pursuit ofthe Past (1973), triggered a major change in archaeologicalresearch in the 1960s and 1970s that is still influential today.Binford is also famous for his studies of animal bones and ofhunter-gatherer societies, ancient and modern.

James Deetz (1930-2001) was a brilliant teacher andworld-famous historical archaeologist. He worked on Califor-nia mission archaeology, at Plimoth Plantation, and on othercolonial American sites. Deetz's Invitation to Archaeology(1967) and In Small Things Forgotten (1991), although shortpaperbacks, are among the most influential books on archae-ological practice ever written.

Hester Davis (b. 1930) was trained at the University ofNorth Carolina and has spent her career in Arkansas, whereshe was one of the organizers of the Arkansas ArchaeologicalSurvey. Davis is internationally famous for her efforts todevelop legislation to protect archaeological sites both inArkansas and nationally.

Stuart Struever (b. 1931) is a North American archae-ologist famous for his enormous excavations at Koster in theMidwest's Illinois Valley. Here, successive groups of ancientnative Americans settled at the same location from about10,000 years ago to the threshold of historic times. Strueveralso pioneered the use of computers to record and classifydata recovered from archaeological excavations.

Roger Green (b. 1932), a pioneer in the developmentof Pacific prehistory, is well known for identifying thefamous Lapita culture in the eastern Pacific. This culture


hh

is associated with the spread of humansettlement as far east in the Pacific asFiji and Tonga.

Patty Jo Watson (b. 1932) ofWashington University, Saint Louis, isfamous for her research at MammothCave, Kentucky. There, she pioneeredthe use of flotation methods to recoverlarge numbers of seeds by passing themthrough water. These researches haveshown that the inhabitants of Mam-moth Cave used all kinds of wild plantfoods, to the point that they were easilyable to grew domesticated maize afterAD 1000

George Bass (b. 1934) is effectivelythe founder of underwater archaeology.He has developed scientific methods forexcavating and recording sites on thesea bed that are used internationallytoday. Bass is famous for several ship-wreck excavations, notably the Ulubu-run Bronze Age shipwreck off southernTurkey, dating to about 1310 BC, exca-vated with Aemal Pulak. This remark-able excavation of the 1980s revolu-tionized our knowledge of commerciallife in the eastern Mediterranean morethan 3,000 years ago.

Kent Flannery (b. 1934) has spenthis career working in Central Americaand, on one occasion, in Peru. Hismost important work, on the origins ofagriculture and the beginnings ofMesoamerican civilization, is in theValley of Oaxaca, Mexico. Flannery'sThe Early Mesoamerican Village (1976)is an influential book that contrasts theolder and newer ways of carrying outarchaeological research.

David Clark (1937-76), a Cam.bridge University archaeologist,acquired notoriety at an early age forhis remarkable and critical theoreticalstudies. His book Analytical Archae-ology (1968) foreshadowed many ofthe major theoretical advances inarchaeology that unfolded in the late1960s and the 1970s.

Glynn Isaac (1937-85) was a youngpaleoanthropologist and archaeologist

of great brilliance who died at a tragi-cally young age. He excavated at thefamous 300,000-year-old OlorgesaillieStone Age site in Kenya's Rift Valley,and at early hominid sites in EastTurkana in northern Kenya. Isaac ismainly remembered for his theoriesabout early human behavior, whichsaw our earliest ancestors as oppor-tunists. They survived by taking advan-tage of food supplies of all kinds whenthey encountered them, and also usedbase camps.

Charles Higham (b. 1937) is anexpert in southeast Asian archaeologywho has excavated extensively in Thai-land, investigating the origins of riceagriculture and civilization in that

Shipwreck excavations, such as thoseundertaken by George Bass, require notonly diving expertise but all manner ofspecial recovery and recording meth-ods. Larger artifacts, such as these con-tainers, are usually taken to the surfacein large baskets.

S O M E P R O M I N E N T A R C H A E O L O G I S T S O F O U R T I M E • 1 7 1

A panel from Temple XIV at Palenqueshows Lord K'inich Kan B'alam II dancingon a surface covered with symbols forwater Such ceremonies linked the rulerto the Maya cosmos and to rain making.

region. His Archaeology of MainlandSoutheast Asia (1989) was the first sci-entific account of an area vital to ourunderstanding of early Asian civilization.

Colin Renfrew (b. 1937), a lead-ing European archaeologist, was one ofthe pioneers of studying ancient tradein the Near East using minute traceelements in widely traded volcanicglass. Renfrew excavated a celebratedMycenaean shrine at Phylakopi on theisland of Melos in the Aegean Sea andhas worked extensively on the historyof European languages and genetics.

Linda Schele (1942-98) was anepigrapher, one who studies and deci-phers inscriptions. In the 1970s and1980s she was deeply involved in thedecipherment of Mayan writing. Shedid much to disseminate knowledgeof Maya art, culture, and writing to awider audience, especially throughthe book A Forest of Kings, writtenwith Maya archaeologist David Freidelin 1990.

Don Johanson (b. 1943), apalaeoanthropologist, is world famousfor his discovery in 1974, with biologi-cal anthropologist Tim White, of the3.5 million-year-old fossil of Austro/op-ithecus afarensis known as "Lucy." Thesmall, lightly built Lucy is one of theearliest upright walking hominids inthe world.

Richard Leakey (b. 1944) is apalaeoanthropologist famous for hisremarkable hominid discoveries at EastTurkana on the eastern shores of thelake of that name in northern Kenya,East Africa. Leakey, the son of Louisand Mary, found the famous Skull 1470in the 1970s, the remnant of an ances-tral human dating to over 2 millionyears ago. Leakey has also had a distin-guished career in museum administra-tion, politics, and wildlife conservation.

Olga Soffer (b. 1944) is famous forher excavations at the late Ice Agecamp at Mezhirich in Ukraine, datingto about 14,500 BC. The site yieldedthe remains of dome-shaped mammothbone houses inhabited by preshistoricbig-game hunters. Soffer has alsoworked on late Ice Age sites inMoravia, central Europe, and is anexpert on ancient storage methods.

Zahi Hawass (b. 1947), an Egyp-tologist, has devoted much of his careerto excavations in the surroundings ofthe pyramids of Giza. He discovereda rock-cut harbor for barges close tothe pyramids, and a workers' cemeteryoutside the sacred precincts. In recentyears he has been involved in theexcavation of a huge cemetery of mum-mified Egyptians of about 2,000 yearsago, the Valley of the Golden Mum-mies, in the Bahariya Oasis west of theNile River.

Margaret Conkey (b. 1944), of theUniversity of California at Berkeley, isa world authority on late Ice Age artin Europe. She has also worked ongender in the past and is co-editor with


Joan Gero (b. 1940) of EngenderingArchaeology, a classic set of essays onthe subject.

Chris Donnan (b. 1941) is anexpert on the Moche civilization ofPeru's North Coast. He is famousfor his work on Moche painted pots,which record religious ceremonies thatincluded human sacrifices presided overby Moche warrior priests. Donnan wasinvolved in the excavation of the sen-sational Lords of Sipan burials in 1989,and has recently found even earlier,gold'adorned Moche rulers.

Jean Clottes (b. 1933), France'sleading expert on late Ice Age cave art,has studied the newly discovered cavepaintings in the Grotte de Chauvet insoutheastern France. Some of thesepaintings date to over 30,000 years ago.Clottes has worked with David Lewis-Williams on interpretations of Chau-vet and other painted caves, whichattribute many of the paintings to thework of shamans.

Clive Gamble (b. 1951) is a StoneAge archaeologist who has writteninfluential studies of the first humansettlement of Europe. His book ThePalaeolithic Societies of Europe (1999)is an influential account of Stone Agelife before, during, and after the lateIce Age.

Ian Hodder (b. 1949) is both atheoretician and a basic researcher.He was responsible for a revolt againstBinford's processual archaeology inthe late 1970s and 1980s, advocatingmore diverse approaches to the studyof the past. These post-processualapproaches combine science with moreinstinctive interpretations of the past.In recent years Hodder has beeninvolved in an international excava-tion at the early farming village ofQatalhoyiik in central Turkey, whichdates to about 6000 BC.

Patrick Kirch (b. 1950), an archae-ologist of Pacific Ocean cultures, is well

Donald Johanson displays the partial

skeleton of Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis,soon after its discovery in the Hadar

region of Ethiopia.

known for his researches into the firstsettlement of Polynesia and for hisstudies of the nature of chiefdoms inthe ancient Pacific.

David Lewis-Williams (b. 1934) isa South African prehistorian and rockart expert who has devoted his careerto the study of San hunter-gatherer artin southern Africa. Lewis-Williamsrediscovered the linguistic and ethno-graphic researches of 19th-century Ger-man scholar Wilhelm Bleek, who inter-viewed San informants. From thiswork, Lewis-Williams developed newinterpretations of their rock art, whichattribute much of it to the work ofshamans in hallucinogenic trances.

Ivor Noel Hume (b. 1927) is ahistorical archaeologist who excavatedthe Colonial American village at Mar-tin's Hundred, Virginia, which wasattacked by local American Indiansin 1623. He has also carried out exten-sive excavations at Jamestown andWilliamsburg, Virginia, and he is anexpert on ceramics.

S O M E P R O M I N E N T A R C H A E O L O G I S T S O F O U R T I M E • 1 7 3

]\/f • 17 f ' 15?* '859J_f J_C1,I O.L |j y Cyj IT.S J.J..L Publication of William Camden's Britannia Establishment of human antiquity, the

v association of extinct animals and humanlyI-Vi £fc T-T-i a i- s\ V»T T r\ t 1649 ma<^e artifacts Publication of Charlesme nisiory 01 )***,&«, «*,***»*, n^o**.****Archaeology I7M.M ^

O*/ W7-H- 011 A 1 j Edouard Lartet excavates Cro-Magnon,William Stukeley maps Avebury and , T A . , -r01 / r / iate |c e ^pe caves l n southwestern Franceotonehenge

J738 iSSZr. T T 1 • Charles Warren excavates beneathFirst excavations at Herculaneum, commis- T jsioned by the king of Naples

.798 1871^ General Napoleon Bon • invades Heinrich Schliemann excavates HomericGeneral Napoleon Bonaparte invades Tr , . . . with. TroyEgypt, taking scientists with him

1799 hide , , i. the, ^ George Smith discovers, among artifacts inNapoleon's troops discover the Rosetta u rs • •-L \/ u «FA i T ui »(~, ^ ^ the British Museum, the Deluge 1 ablets

with an account of a Babylonian flood

i«? 1875-81Jean Francois Champollion deciphers r r> • r\\ • r>V- • u- IK Ernst Curtius excavates Olympia, Greece,

*^P ^ ̂ with new scientific methods

1839-42 1876John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Heinrich- digs MycenaeCatherwood explore Maya sites\/ . i n • / - > central Heinrich schliemann digs Mycenae,Catherwood explore Maya sites in Central ^

I J'TPGC.CAmerica and reveal Maya civilization to anastonished world

1879

1843-45 Altamira Stone Age cave paintings found,7; TT: ~j ^ 7 : 77. northern SpainPaul bmile Botta excavates Assyrian KingSargon's palace at Khorsabad, Iraq

1881

1845-50 General Augustus Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers~7 7T * ] T ; begins Cranborne Chase excavations,Austen Henry Layard excavates Assyrian i c i j. . . , T , , , southern Englandcities in northern Iraq and unearths theAssyrian civilization

1899-1912

I QJ^ Robert Koldeway's Babylon excavationsr; j ; 7~, TTT 7~. \ revolutionize mud brick excavationNeanderthal skull discovered m theNeander Valley, Germany

1900

Arthur Evans starts excavations atKnossos, Crete, palace of the Minoan civi-lization


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1908 1961

Cowboy George Mcjunkin finds the Discovery of Homo habilis, Olduvai Gorge,Folsom site, New Mexico Tanzania

1912 1960s ONWARD

Hiram Bingham visits Macchu Picchu, Development of the "new archaeology,"Peru often called processual archaeology

1917-22 1970s ONWARD

Manuel Gamio surveys the city of Emergence of post-processual archaeologyTeotihuacan, Mexico as an alternative to processual archaeology

1922 1974

Discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh "Lucy," Australopithecus afarensis, found inTutankhamun by Howard Carter and the Ethiopia's (Djibouti) Afar regionEarl of Carnarvon . , .

Discovery or the terra-cotta regiment orEmperor Shihuangdi, China

Raymond Dart discovers Australopithecus • gjjafricanus, the southern ape-human ~ r~ . : : : ~

Han royal burials unearthed in China

1?26 19JB^2

Leonard Woolley excavates the Royal ~ ;—: ~ ;—7~,/ - > ^ . ,. T T T / „• • T T excavations at the Aztec lemple or theCemetery at Ur, Iraq (excavations in Ur 0 _ 1TI . ., , ,. . £_ .from 1922 to 1934) n Huitzilopochth, the lemplo

Mayor," Mexico City

1™ ,932Co-existence of humans and extinct bison ~~ ~— — —~jestablished by excavations at Folsom, New DlscoverY of the Uluburun ship, TurkeyMexico

19891946 Discovery of the Moche lords of Sipan,

Viru Valley project, coastal Peru eru

1947 1WJDiscovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jordan Discovery of the Bronze Age "Ice Man" in

the Italian Alps.

1949 |994

Development of radiocarbon dating, — 777; —University of Chicago Discovery of 31,000-year-old Cro-Magnon

paintings in the Urotte de Chauvet, rrance

i*te .,«Star Carr excavations, England ~ ~ :—— ~

Excavation of the tomb of Rameses 11 ssons, Valley of the Kings, Egypt

1959Discovery of Zinjanthropus boisei, OlduvaiGorge, Tanzania

M A J O R E V E N T S I N T H E H I S T O R Y O F A R C H A E O L O G Y • 1 7 5

1924

1994

sun god

prt

Major Eventsin PrehistoricTimes

KEY

AD Anno Domini (year of our lord)

BC Before Christ

BP Before present

MYA Million years ago

ABOUT 5.0 MYA

Humans split off from nearest living pri-mate relatives, the ancestors of chim-panzees

2.5 MYA

Homo habilis and the first simple toolmak-ing culture

1.9 MYA

First appearance of Homo ergaster (Homoerectus) in tropical Africa

Development of the handax, an artifactflaked on both sides

1.8 MYA

First human settlement of southern andeastern Asia perhaps by Homo erectus

ABOUT 650,000 BP

First human settlement of Europe byHomo erectus

ABOUT I 75,000 BP

First modern humans evolve in tropicalAfrica

100,000 BPNeanderthals widespread in Europe

Modern humans first appear in southwest-ern Asia and coexist with Neanderthals

42,000 BP First modern humans (Cro-Magnons) appear in Central Europe

35,000 BP First colonization of Australiaand New Guinea by this date

30,000 BPThe last Neanderthals become extinct;cave art appears in Europe just beforethis date

18,000 BPCro-Magnon cultures flourish in Europeand Eurasia

15,000 BPApproximate date for the first settlementof the Americas across the Bering LandBridge and by adjacent waters

End of the Great Ice Age

10,000 BCFirst domestication of plants in southwest-ern Asia; animal domestication followssoon afterward

6000 BCWidespread farming villages betweenGreece, Turkey, Mesopotamia, and theNile Valley

5800 BCA rising Mediterranean Sea floods thefreshwater Euxine Lake, forming the BlackSea

5500 BCAgriculture spreads into temperate Europe

3I00 BCUnification of Egypt into a single state bythe pharaoh Narmer

Founding of Sumerian city-states

Maize domesticated in Central America bythis date

Complex hunter-gatherer societies devel-oping in parts of North America

2550 BCAvebury stone circles in use, England

2550 BCPyramid building in Old Kingdom Egypt

2300 BCMajor construction at Stonehenge,England

Third Dynasty at Ur extends Sumeriancivilization from Mesopotamia to theMediterranean

2180 BCMajor famines in Egypt, which breaksdown into provinces

I900 BCHarappan civilization flourishes in theIndus River, Pakistan


I600 BCMinoan civilization on Crete and Aegeanislands

Shang civilization in northern China

Middle Kingdom pharaohs reunite Egypt

I500 BCOlmec civilization in lowland Mesoamerica

Mycenaean civilization in mainlandGreece and Aegean

I275 BC

New Kingdom Egypt at the height of itspower

The heretic pharaoh Akhenaten rulesEgypt

1200 BCWidespread disorder in the easternMediterranean world

Collapse of Hittite civilization

I070 BCEnd of New Kingdom Egypt and Egypt'sgreatest political power

Settlement of offshore Pacific islandsbegins

850 BCEtruscan civilization in Italy

753 BCFounding of Rome

ABOUT 700 BC

Assyrian civilization at its height

612 BCNineveh sacked by Babylonians and others

580 BCKing Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon

450 BCClassical Greece at its height

200 BCCarthaginian wars end in Rome's victory

55 BCRoman general Julius Caesar lands inBritain

30 BCEgypt becomes a province of the RomanEmpire

AD 200

Classic Maya civilization expands

AD 600

Moche civilization of northern coastal Peruat its height

City of Teotihuacan, highland Mexico,rises to its greatest power

AD 900

Collapse of classic Maya civilization in thesouthern Maya lowlands

AD 1000

Norse voyagers in touch withNewfoundland

By this date, the first settlement of NewZealand

Tiwanaku state at its height, Lake Titicaca,Bolivia

AD 1200

Toltec civilization of Mexico

Mississippian chiefdoms of NorthAmerican approach their greatest power

AD 1400

Chimu civilization of coastal Peru

AD 1492Christopher Columbus lands in theBahamas

AD 1519-21Hernan Cortes lands in Mexico and con-quers the Aztec civilization, reducing theircapital, Tenochtitlan, to rubble

AD 1531

Francisco Pizarro encounters and conquersthe Inca civilization of Peru

M A J O R E V E N T S I N P R E H I S T O R I C T I M E S • 1 7 7

Abu Simbel—Temple built by theancient Egyptian pharaoh Rameses IIon the banks of the Nile in Nubia(Sudan), about 1270 BC.

Abydos—Sacred community andburial place of early Egyptian kings,believed to be close to the gatewayto the underworld.

Accelerator Mass Spectrometry(AMS) dating—Refined method ofradiocarbon dating which counts thenumber of carbon-14 atoms present,using a high-energy mass spectrometer.

Acheulian—Term applied to culturesthat made distinctive stone axesbetween about 1.9 million years agoand 200,000 years before the present.Named after the town of St. Acheulin northern France, where many handaxes were found.

Agricultural (Neolithic)Revolution—Term coined by archae-ologist Vere Gordon Childe to refer tothe appearance of animal and plantdomestication in the Near East.Characterized by settled village life,pottery, and other innovations.

Altamira—Cave in northern Spainwhere 15,000-year-old Cro-Magnonrock paintings were first discoveredin 1879.

Angles-sur-L'Anglin—Late Ice Agecave in southwestern France thatyielded 16,000-year-old reliefs of ani-mals and women.

Angkor civilization—Khmer civiliza-tion in Cambodia, dating to the earlyfirst millennium AD, remarkable for itselaborate palaces and temples.

anthropology—The study of humanityin the widest possible sense. Includesarchaeology, the study of ancientcultures.

Anyang—Capital of the Shang civi-lization in northern China, about1500 BC.

archaeology—The study of the humanpast and ancient human behaviorusing material remains.

Arikamedu—Southern Indian settle-ment with connections with theRoman Empire dating to the firstcentury AD.

Avebury—Large stone circle complexin southern England built by StoneAge farmers in about 2500 BC.

Banpo—Stone Age farming villagein northern China dating to about4000 BC.

Barton Ramie, Belize—Maya centerin Honduras dating to the seventhcentury AD.

Behistun (Bisitun)—Ruined city, siteof a famous trilingual inscription onan cliff face in Iran, commemoratingPersian King Darius's victory overrebels in 522 BC. The inscriptionhelped in the decipherment ofcuneiform script.

Beni Hassan—Cemetery in MiddleEgypt famous for its wall paintings ofimportant provincial governors fromabout 2000 BC.

Birbinkilise—Site of the so-calledThousand-and-One Byzantine church-es in Turkey, now largely destroyed.Dates to the first millennium AD.

Brixham Cave—Late Ice Age cavernin southern England with occupationdating to about 18,000 years ago.

Carchemish—Major Hittite city onthe Euphrates River that guarded amajor river crossing. Also occupied bythe Romans as a frontier post.

Qatalhoyiik—Early farming village inTurkey famous for its householdshrines, dating to about 6000 BC.

Chichen Itza—Late Maya city innorthern Yucatan, Mexico, celebratedboth for its architecture and its SacredCenote, an offering pool; flourishedabout AD 1200.

Cissbury Hill—Iron Age hill fort insouthern England dating to the latefirst millennium BC.

context—In archaeology, the exactphysical position of an artifact or otherarchaeological find in a site and itsdate or age in time.

Copan—Major Maya city and ceremo-nial center in Honduras; flourishedbefore AD 900.


Glossary of Archaeological Sites and Terms

Cro-Magnon—Generic name giventhe anatomically modern humans wholived in Europe during the late IceAge, after about 40,000 years ago.Named after the Cro-Magnon rockshelter near Les Eyzies, France.

cross-dating—Method that uses arti-facts of known age, such as coins, todate sites where they are found far fromthe objects' places of origin.

culture history—The study of prehis-toric societies using artifacts and theirlocation-age contexts to place them inorder through time and across thelandscape.

cuneiform—Wedge-shaped script usedby early Mesopotamian civilizations,written on clay. Cuneiform becamethe diplomatic script of eastern Medi-terranean states, including Egypt, formany centuries.

cylinder seal—Small stone cylindercarved with distinctive script that wasrolled into clay or wax to leave animpression; used by the Minoan civi-lization, first millennium BC.

Danger Cave—Dry cave in Utah thatwas occupied by humans from before9000 BC until recent times. During thislong occupation, the tools and lifestyleof the inhabitants changed little.

Deir el-Bahari—Burial area on thewest bank of the Nile opposite Luxor;location of the mortuary temple ofQueen Hatshepsut (about 1400 BC).

dendrochronology—Dating methodbased on counting and matching thegrowth rings of tree trunks.

Devil's Tower—Cave on the Rock ofGibraltar at the southern tip of Spainthat has yielded Neanderthal fossils.

Direct Historical Method—Approachto archaeology that involves workingwith artifacts and stratified occupationlayers from the present back into thepast. First pioneered in the AmericanSouthwest.

Druids—Prehistoric British priests;observed by the Roman general JuliusCaesar in 55 BC.

el-Amarna—Short-lived royal capitalof the heretic Egyptian pharaohAkhenaten, occupied about 1350 BC.

el-Kahun—Middle Kingdom Egyptiancommunity in Upper Egypt thathoused the funerary workers of KingSenusret II (1897-1878 BC).

Fayum Depression—Low-lying areawest of the Nile River in Lower Egypt,once a lake surrounded by fertileland. Site of early agricultural settle-ments dating to about 4000 BCand later a major center of ancientEgyptian agriculture.

flotation—A method of recoveringtiny plant remains by passing themthrough water and fine screens.The seeds float to the top and aretrapped in the screen mesh; the residuefalls through.

Font de Gaume—Cro-Magnon rockshelter with mammoth paintings about18,000 years old, located near LesEyzies, France.

Gamble's Cave—Stone Age cave incentral Kenya occupied from as longago as 20,000 years before the present.

Giza, Pyramids of—Royal burialplaces for Egypt's Old Kingdompharaohs, about 2550 BC.

Gournia—Minoan community innorthern Crete dating to about1500 BC.

Hadrian's Wall—Defensive wallagainst northern Britons built inEngland by Roman emperor Hadrianbetween AD 122 and 130.

Harappa—Major city of the Harappancivilization (named after the city) inthe Indus River Valley, dating to about1700BC.

Haua Fteah—Large cave in northernLibya that yielded traces of humanoccupation from at least 50,000 yearsago up to 10,000 BC.

Hawara—Roman-Egyptian cemetery ofAD 100-250 in the Fayum Depressionwest of the Nile River. Many of themummies in the cemetery bore por-traits of the deceased.

Herculaneum—Roman city nearNaples, Italy, destroyed by an eruptionof Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79.

hieroglyphs—Literally, picture signs,which formed the basis of AncientEgyptian and Mayan scripts, althoughthe two are not related.

Hissarlik—Ancient city mound innortheastern Turkey, the site ofHomeric Troy. A major Bronze Agecity in the second millennium BC.

Hittite civilization—Major civilizationcentered on Turkey; it was a majorpolitical and economic presence in theeastern Mediterranean world, 1700 to1200 BC.

hominid—A member of the familyHominidae, represented today byone species, modern humans (Homosapiens).

Igbo-Ukwu—Site of important royalburials of the 9th century AD inNigeria, famous for their lavishadornments.

G L O S S A R Y O F A R C H A E O L O G I C A L S I T E S A N D T E R M S 1 7 9

Jericho—Biblical city in Jordan, thelower levels of which comprise some ofthe earliest farming villages in theworld, about 9000 BC. One of the set-tlements is fortified with a stone walland watchtower.

Kalambo Falls—Major Stone Age siteon the Tanzania-Zambia border inCentral Africa, with human occupa-tion dating back at least 300,000 years.

Kanam and Kanyera—Two humanfossil-bearing locations in East Africafound in 1933, claimed to be of highantiquity but subsequently discredited.

Karnak—Elaborate temple to theancient Egyptian god Amun atLuxor; flourished in the secondmillennium BC.

Kharga Oasis—Oasis west of the NileRiver in Egypt that contains signs ofextensive Stone Age occupation dat-ing to at least 300,000 years ago.

Khorsabad—Capital of AssyrianKing Sargon II (721-705 BC) innorthern Iraq.

Khotan—Important empire of thefirst millennium AD on the China-India border.

Knossos—Site of the famed Palace ofMinos, capital of the Minoan civiliza-tion; occupied between about 2000and 1400 BC.

Koster—Prehistoric site in the IllinoisRiver Valley, with human occupationfrom before 8000 BC to AD 1200.

Kuyunjik—A palace mound atNineveh.

La Cotte de St. Brelade—Cliff face onthe island of Jersey in the EnglishChannel over which Neanderthalsdrove mammoth and rhinoceros morethan 100,000 years ago to kill them forfood, tusks, and hides.

Laetoli—Site of sets of 3.6 million-year-old hominid footprints inTanzania, East Africa.

Le Moustier—French rock shelterinhabited by Neanderthals about75,000 years ago.

Les Combarelles—Deep Cro-Magnoncave with rock engravings about15,000 years old, located near LesEyzies, France.

Linear A and B—Minoan scripts.Recovered examples are mainly recordsof commercial transactions. Linear Ahas not yet been deciphered.

Long Count—The linear calendardeveloped by the Maya civilization ofCentral America.

Lydney—Roman-British sanctuary inwestern England dating to the 2ndcentury BC.

Maglemose culture—ScandinavianMesolithic culture that placed a majoremphasis on fishing and bird hunting.Dates from before 6000 to 5000 BCand later.

Maiden Castle—British Iron Age hillfort in southern England besieged andcaptured by a Roman legion in AD 43.

Mal'ta—Important Siberian huntingcamp at the southern end of LakeBaikal, occupied about 21,000years ago.

Martin's Hundred—Colonial villagein Virginia attacked by NativeAmericans in 1623.

Meilgaard—Famous shell midden sitein Denmark occupied by people of theStone Age Maglemose culture, about7000 BC.

Meroe—African state and city cen-tered on the Sudan and the NileValley that flourished from about 590BC to AD 350. The people and theirculture are termed Meroitic.

Mesolithic—Term used to refer tohunter-gatherers who flourished inEurope after the Ice Age.

Mesoamerica—Area of CentralAmerica where advanced civilizationsarose after 1000 BC.

Mesopotamia—Greek for "the landbetween the rivers," applied to the flatlands between the Euphrates and Tigrisrivers in southern Iraq. Cradle of someof the world's earliest civilizations.

midden—An accumulation of humangarbage of all kinds.

Minoan civilization—Cretan BronzeAge civilization; flourished betweenabout 2000 and 1400 BC.

Moche civilization—Elaborate coastalriver valley civilization in northernPeru, dating to the mid-first millen-nium BC.

Mohenjo-daro—Major city of theHarappan civilization of the IndusRiver Valley in Pakistan, dating toabout 1700 BC.


Mount Carmel caves—ImportantStone Age caves on the coast ofpresent-day Israel; they provide asequence of Neanderthal and modernhuman occupation from about 70,000years ago until 10,000 years beforethe present.

Mugau—Buddhist cave shrines ofthe first millennium AD in easternChina, famous for their paintingsand statuaries.

Mycenae—Bronze Age citadel insouthern Greece built by a chieflydynasty of the Mycenaean civilization,about 1300 BC.

Neolithic—"New Stone Age"; termused to refer to Stone Age farmers.Now somewhat outdated, but a conve-nient label.

Niaux—Cro-Magnon painted cave insouthern France, about 14,000 yearsold, famous for its magnificent bisonpaintings.

Naqada—Early Egyptian town associat-ed with extensive desert cemeteriesdating to before dynastic Egyptiantimes of 4,000 BC and later.

Nimrud—Assyrian city in northernIraq also known as Calah, once thepalace of the Assyrian KingEsarhaddon (680-669 BC) and twoother Assyrian monarchs. Famous forits magnificent ivories.

Nineveh—Biblical city in northernIraq associated with Assyrian KingAssurbanipal (668-627 BC). Sacked bythe Babylonians and others in 612 BC.

Njoro River Cave—Stone Age cave inKenya with human occupation datingto about 3,000 years ago.

Olorgesaillie—A 300,000-year-oldStone Age kill and butchery site inKenya's Rift Valley.

Olduvai Gorge—Deep gorge on theedge of Tanzania's Serengeti Plains,with evidence of human occupationfrom about 2 million years ago to100,000 years before the present.Known for its early hominid fossils,which write much of the history ofearly human evolution.

Pachamacac—Important Inca ceremo-nial center in southern coastal Perudating to the 15th century AD.

Palaeolithic—"Old Stone Age"; pre-historic times before the advent of agri-culture. A now seldom used term.

Palenque—Important Maya city asso-ciated with a dynasty of powerful rulerswho reigned from AD 431 to 799.

paleoanthropology—The multidiscipli-nary study of early human evolution,including archaeology.

Peacock's Farm—Mesolithic site ineastern England celebrated for its asso-ciation of flint tools with swamp levels,dated to 6500 BC.

Pecos—Long-inhabited pueblo innorthern New Mexico that providedthe first stratigraphic sequence for theSouthwest. Famous also for its earlySpanish mission.

Persepolis—Palace complex in centralIran built by King Darius the Greatin about 518 BC. It was looted andburned by Alexander the Great in331-330 BC.

Petra—Famous Nabatean and Romancaravan city in Jordan famous for itsnarrow entrance and fine temples.

Philae—Island in the Nile in UpperEgypt famous for a magnificent templeto the goddess Isis.

Phylakopi—Mycenaean village andshrine on the island of Melos in theAegean, about 1300 BC.

Pompeii—Roman town near Naples,Italy, destroyed by an eruption of Mt.Vesuvius in AD 79.

post-processual archaeology—A seriesof theoretical approaches to archaeolo-gy that argue for the importance ofindividual and group interactions inchanging human cultures and societies.

potassium-argon dating—Method thatuses the decay rates of radioactive ele-ments in volcanic rocks to date earlyhuman and geological sites.

prehistory—That period of the humanpast not covered by written records.

primate—Highest order of mammals;includes apes, humans, and monkeys.

processual archaeology—Archaeologybased on the idea that human culturesare systems which interact with ecolog-ical systems. Focuses on explaining theprocesses of culture change.

radiocarbon dating—Method based onmeasuring the decay radioactive ele-ments in organic materials like bone,charcoal, and wood to date sites up toabout 40,000 years old.

rath—An earthen or stone enclosurethat forms a hill fort.

G L O S S A R Y O F A R C H A E O L O G I C A L S I T E S A N D T E R M S 1 8 1

Rollright Stones—Prehistoric stonecircle in Oxfordshire, England, estimat-ed to date to about 2,500 BC.

Saqqara—Burial place of ancientEgyptian pharaohs of the Old andMiddle Kingdoms, also center of thecult of the bull god Apis.

Shang civilization—One of the firstcivilizations of northern China, datingto about 1766 to 1122 BC. Centered onHwang Ho, the Yellow River.

shell midden—Accumulated pile ofthe remains of freshwater or saltwatershellfish gathered by humans, presum-ably for food.

Silk Road—Ancient trading routebetween China and the West thatpassed through Central Asia.

Sipan—Region of Moche burial sites innorth coastal Peru dating to AD 400.

Skara Brae—Stone Age farming vil-lage in Scotland's Orkney Islands dat-ing to about 2000 BC.

Snaketown—Large prehistoric town inArizona occupied by Hohokam peoplefrom AD 500 to 1450. The Hohokamwere expert irrigation farmers.

Somme River gravels—Sites celebrat-ed for their abundance of Stone Agehand axes and other artifacts, andbones of extinct animals, dating mainlyto about 300,000 years ago.

Star Carr—Mesolithic encampment innortheastern England now dated toabout 9500 BC, which yielded evidenceof deer hunting.

Stanwick—Iron Age hill fort in north-eastern England dating to the 1st cen-tury BC.

Stonehenge—Stone circles erectedby Stone Age and Bronze Age farm-ers after 2300 BC; flourished about1800 BC.

Sumerian civilization—First urban civ-ilization in Mesopotamia (southernIraq), where a patchwork of city states,notably Sumer, formed a distinctivecivilization after 3100 BC.

Three Age System—Classificationsystem for Old World prehistorydeveloped by Danish archaeologistC. J. Thomsen in 1807. The three ages,from the oldest, are Stone, Bronze,and Iron.

Tikal—Maya city in Guatemala thatwas one of the largest and most impor-tant of all Maya city-states; flourishedin AD 600.

Trilithon—A stone arch formed bytwo uprights and a cross lintel. Foundat Stonehenge, England.

typology—In archaeology, the study ofartifact classification.

Uaxacatun—Large Maya center inGuatemala close to Tikal.

Ukhaidir—An Abbasid caliph's palacein northern Iraq dating to the 6th cen-tury AD.

Uluburun shipwreck—Bronze Ageshipwreck off southern Turkey datingto about 1310 BC, remarkable for itscargo from nine countries in the east-ern Mediterranean.

Ur (Ur-of-the Chaldees)—ImportantSumerian city in southern Iraq occu-pied from the earliest stages of Meso-potamian civilization. Famous for itsroyal cemetery of about 2900 BC.

Urban Revolution—Term coined byarchaeologist Vere Gordon Childe toidentify the appearance of civilizationin the Near East, marked by cities,metallurgy, writing, and other charac-teristics.

Uxmal—Classic Maya city in Mexico'sYucatan; reached its peak about AD800. Famous for its fine architecture.

Valley of the Kings—Burial placeof ancient Egypt's New Kingdompharaohs, 1530-1070 BC.

Verulamium—Roman-British townnorth of London, England, whichflourished in the 2nd century AD.

Viru Valley—Peruvian coastal rivervalley occupied by 2000 BC into thefirst millennium AD.

Yangshao—Chinese early farming vil-lage in the Hwang Ho (Yellow River)Valley dating to about 4000 BC.

Zimbabwe (or Great Zimbabwe)—Stone building complex in southernAfrica built by Shona-speakingAfricans between AD 1000 and 1450;the center of a powerful cattle kingdomand a major trade center.

A R C H A E O L O G I S T S1 8 2

Further Reading and Websites

Readings about the individual archaeologists in this bookare included at the end of each profile. The following listoffers a brief sampling of a vast amount of literature aboutarchaeology. All of the sources here include bibliographies,which will lead you to the more specialized literature.

What Happened in the Past?

Clark, Grahame. World Prehistory: A New Outline. NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Fagan, Brian. People of the Earth. 10th ed. Upper SaddleRiver, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2001.

. World Prehistory: A Brief Introduction. 5th ed. UpperSaddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002.

Gamble, Clive. Timewalkers. Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1994.

Price, Douglas, and Gary Feinman. Images of the Past. 3rded. Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield, 2001.

How Archaeology Works

Deetz, James. In Small Things Forgotten. Rev. ed. New York:Anchor/Doubleday, 1996.

. Invitation to Archaeology. New York: NaturalHistory, 1967.

Fagan, Brian. Archaeology: A Brief Introduction. 7th ed.Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2000.

. In the Beginning. 10th ed. Upper Saddle River,N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2001.

. Time Detectives. New York: Simon & Schuster,1995.

Sharer, Robert J., and Wendy Ashmore. The Foundations ofArchaeology. 4th ed. Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield, 1998.

Thomas, David Hurst. Archaeology. 3rd ed. Fort Worth:Harcourt College Publishers, 2000.

The History of Archaeology

Bahn, Paul, ed. The Cambridge Illustrated History ofArchaeology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Ceram, C. W. Gods, Graves & Scholars. 2nd ed. New York:Vintage, 1986.

Coe, Michael. Breaking the Maya Code. London: Thamesand Hudson, 1992.

. One Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology.London: Thames and Hudson, 1981.

Fagan, Brian. The Adventure of Archaeology. WashingtonD.C.: National Geographic, 1985.

. Elusive Treasure. New York: Scribners, 1977.

. The Rape of the Nik. New York: Scribners, 1975.

. Return to Babylon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.

Larsen, Mogens Trolle. The Conquest of Assyria. London:Routledge, 1996.

Lloyd, Seton. Foundations in the Dust. London: Thames andHudson, 1980.

Murray, Tim, ed. The Great Archaeologists. Santa Barbara,Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1999.

Reeves, Nicholas. Ancient Egypt: The Great Discoveries.London: Thames and Hudson, 2001.

Trigger, Bruce. A History of Archaeological Thought. NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Willey, Gordon R., and Jeremy A. Sabloff. A History ofAmerican Archaeology. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974.

Archaeological Reference Books

Bahn, Paul, ed. 100 Great Archaeological Discoveries. NewYork: Barnes and Noble, 1995.

Fagan, Brian, ed. Eyewitness to Discovery. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1997.

F U R T H E R R E A D I N G A N D W E B S I T E S 1 8 3

Fagan, Brian, ed. The Oxford Companion to Archaeology.New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Scarre, Chris, ed. Past Worlds: The Times Atlas of

Archaeology. London: Times Books, 1988.

General Surveys of SomeResearch Topics and Regions

Human Origins

Johanson, Donald C., and Maitland A. Edey. Lucy. NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 1981.

Leakey, Richard, and Roger Lewin. Origins. New York:Penguin, 1991.

Lewin, Roger. Bones of Contention. New York: Simon &

Schuster, 1977.

The Neanderthals

Stringer, Christopher, and Clive Gamble. In Search of theNeanderthals. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.

Origins of Modern Humansand the Human Mind

Mithen, Steven. The Prehistory of the Mind. London:Thames and Hudson, 1996.

Stringer, Christopher, and Robin McKie. African Exodus.

New York: Holt, 1996.

Origins of Agriculture and Civilization

Redman, Charles L. The Rise of Civilization. San Francisco:Freeman, 1978.

Robinson, Andrew. The Story of Writing. London: Thamesand Hudson, 1995.

Scarre, Chris, and Brian Fagan. Ancient Civilizations. 2nd ed.

Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2002.

Smith, Bruce D. The Emergence of Agriculture. New York:

Scientific American, 1994.

Biblical and Classical Archaeology

Hornblower, Simon, and Anthony Spawforth, eds. The

Oxford Classical Dictionary. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1996.

Levy, T. E., ed. The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land.New York: Facts on File, 1995.

Historical Archaeology

Noel Hume, Ivor. Historical Archaeology. New York: Knopf,

1969.

. Martin's Hundred. rev. ed. Charlottesville:University of Virginia Press, 1991.

Orser, Charles E., and Brian Fgan. Historical Archaeology.New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

Underwater Archaeology

Bass, George. Archaeology Underwater. London: Thames andHudson, 1966.

, ed. A History of Seafaring Based on UnderwaterArchaeology. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972.

, ed. Ships and Shipwrecks of the Americas. London:

Thames and Hudson, 1988.

African Archaeology

Connah, Graham. African Civilizations. New York: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1987.

Phillipson, Davis W. African Prehistory. 2nd ed. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Oliver, Roland. The African Experience. London: Weidenfeldand Nicholson, 1991.

Oliver, Roland, and John Fage, eds. The Cambridge History of

Africa. Vol. 1, Prehistory. New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1981.


The Americas

Bernal, Ignacio. A History of Mexican Archaeology. London:Thames and Hudson, 1980.

Coe, Michael. The Maya. 6th ed. London: Thames andHudson, 1999.

. Mexico. 4th ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1994.

Dillehay, Tom. First Settlement of America: A New Prehistory.New York: Basic Books, 2000.

Fagan, Brian. Ancient North America: The Archaeology of aContinent. 3rd ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001.

. Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade. London:Thames and Hudson, 1991.

Feidel, Stuart J. Prehistory of the Americas. 2nd ed. NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Meltzer, David. The Search for the First Americans.Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1994.

Moseley, Michael. The Inca and their Predecessors. 2nd ed.London: Thames and Hudson, 2001.

Australia and Pacific, Asia

Barnes, Gina L. China, Korea, and Japan: The Rise ofCivilization in East Asia. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.

Bellwood, Peter. The Polynesians. London: Thames andHudson, 1987.

Chang, K-C. The Archaeology of Ancient China. 4th ed. NewHaven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986.

Higham, Charles. The Archoeology of Mainland SoutheastAsia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Kirch, Patrick V. The Lapita Peoples: Ancestors of the OceanicWorld. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997.

. On the Road of the Winds: An Archoeologicol Historyof the Pacific Islands. Berkeley: University of California Press,2000.

Possehl, Gregory, ed. The Harappan Civilization. London:Aris and Phillips, 1982.

White, J. Peter, and James O'Connell. A Prehistory ofAustralia, New Guinea, and Sahul. New York: Academic,1982.

Egypt

Fagan, Brian. Egypt of the Pharaohs. Washington, D.C.:National Geographic Society, 2001.

Kemp, Barry. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization.London: Routledge, 1989.

Shaw, Ian, ed. The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Europe

Childe, V. Gordon. The Prehistory of European Society.Baltimore: Pelican, 1958.

Cunliffe, Barry, ed. The Oxford Illustrated History ofPrehistoric Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Gamble, Clive. The Palaeolithic Societies of Europe. NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Renfrew, Colin. Before Civilization. New York: Knopf, 1981.

Piggott, Stuart. Ancient Europe. Chicago: Aldine, 1965.

WEBSITES

American Museum of Natural History Resources forLearning

www.amnh.org/education/resources/index.html

This section of the AMNH website provides a collection oflearning resources such as activities and articles in fieldsincluding anthropology and paleontology.

Archaeology Magazine

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ArchNet

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ArchNet serves as the World Wide Web Virtual Libraryfor archaeology. This site provides access to archaeologicalresources available on the Internet. Information is catego-rized by geographic region and subject and includes listsof excavation sites, museums, academic departments, andjournals.

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This site offers information about past and current BritishMuseum sponsored excavations. Using the search feature,visitors can access hundreds of digital images of archaeologi-cal finds. Also, in the Education Department section, visi-tors can find links to pages with recommended books andeducational resources.

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Virtual archaeology is used to help archaeologists manipu-late and analyze materials using computers. This websitegives a tutorial about virtual archaeology and offers a broadlist of sites where visitors can experience virtual archaeology.

Field Museum of Natural Historywww.fmnh.org

Since its founding the Field Museum has been an interna-tional leader in evolutionary biology and paleontology, andarchaeology and ethnography. This site offers introductorynotes to the various fields of natural history and offers help-ful weblinks for more information.

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Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnologywww.peabody.harvard.edu/default.html

This site highlights one of the oldest museums in the worlddevoted to anthropology and houses one of the most com-prehensive records of human cultural history in the WesternHemisphere. This site includes "virtual tours" throughonline exhibitions and online finding aids to the museum'sarchival collection, which holds millions of artifacts, photosand papers.

University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology andAnthropology Educational Departmentwww.upenn.edu/museum/PublicServices/edservices.html

This section of the museum's website offers interactiveintroductions to the field of archaeology and to many keygeographical areas in archaeological study.


www.fmnh.org

www.mnh.si.edu

www.peabody.harvard.edu/default.html

www.upenn.edu/museum/PublicServices/edservices.html

www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk

www.archaeology.co.uk

http://emuseum.mnsu.edu/archaeology/virtual/index.shtml

http://archnet.asu.edu

Index

References to main biographical entries areindicated by bold page numbers; referencesto illustrations are indicated by italics

AbuSimbel, 31Abydos, 81, 133An Account of the Danes and Norwegians in

England, Scotland, and Ireland (Worsaae),38, 39

Adam's Ancestors (Leakey, L.), 150Africa, 11, 73, 158-159, 165, 167, 168African archaeology, 157, 159Agasizz, Alexander, 102Agricultural Revolution, 123, 124Akhenaten, 80, 91Akkadian language, 56Albright, William, 164de Alcubierre, Rocque Joaquin, 16, 23Alms for Oblivion: An Antiquary's Scrapbook

(Wheeler), 145Altamira Cave, 86Amarna, 80, 91American archaeology, 67, 68, 73, 102-104,

126-127, 160-161American Southeast, 127Amiens, 35Amun's temple at Karnak, 59An Introduction to American Archaeology

(Willey), 162Analytical Archaeology (Clark, D.), 171The Ancient Bronze Implements, Weapons,

and Ornaments of Great Britain and Ireland(Evans, J.), 35

Ancient Egypt and Ancient Israel (FlindersPetrie), 81

Ancient Europe (Piggott), 165The Ancient History of Wiltshire (Colt Hoare),

42Ancient India [journal] (Wheeler), 146Ancient Khotan (Stein), 114The Ancient Maya (Morley), 111Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley

(Squier, Davis), 68The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons, and

Ornaments of Great Britain (Evans, J.), 35Angkor civilization, 168Angles-sur-Anglin rock shelter, 139Anyang, 163Archaeological Reconnaissances in Southeastern

Iran (Stein), 116Archaeological researches in Retrospect (Clark,

G.), 155Archaeology and Society (Clark, G.), 155Archaeology at Cambridge and Beyond (Clark,

G.), 156Archaeology at Cambridge and Beyond (Clark,

G.), 155Archaeology from the Earth (Wheeler), 145Archaeology in the Holy Land (Kenyon), 143

Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia (Bass),172

Archaeology of Palestine (Albright), 164Archaeology of the Florida Coast (Willey), 161Archaeology of the United States (Haven), 67Arikamedu, 146The Arts and Crafts of Ancient Egypt (Flinders

Petrie), 81The Aryans (Gordon Childe), 122, 123Ashurbanipal's archives, 54Asia, 13, 164, 171Assurbanipal's palace, 52, 70Assurbanipal's royal library, 46, 56Assyrians, 45-46, 52-54Atwater, Caleb, 43, 46Aubrey, John, 16, 42Aurignacian culture, 88Australian prehistory, 168Austrolopithicus afarensis, 172, 173Australopithicus africanus, 164Avebury, 16, 18-20, 42, 169Avebury, A Temple of British Druids Described

(Stukeley), 19Avebury (Stukeley), 20

Babylon, 54, 126Ban Non Wat, 166Banpo, 164Bartram, William, 42Bass, George, 169, 171, 171Baudez, Claude, 162Beginning in Archaeology (Kenyon), 143Bell, Gertrude, 72, 82, 82-85, 84Belzoni, Giovanni Battista, 16, 29, 29-32,

45, 91Beni Hasan tombs, 126Bersu, Gerhard, 129, 163Biblical archaeology, 63Biblical archaeology, 143Binford, Lewis, 165, 168, 170Bingham, Hiram, 47, 69Biologica Centrali Americana (Maudsley), 126Bleek, Wilhelm, 173Boas, Franz, 103Bonaparte, Napoleon, 44, 45Bordes, Francois, 165Botta, Paul Emile, 7, 45-46, 56, 68Boule, Marcellin, 126Bouyssonnie, Abbe, 87Braidwood, Robert, 164Breasted, Henry, 93Breuil, Abbe Henri, 73, 86, 86-89, 137, 138Britannia (Camden), 41British Mesolithic culture, 154British prehistoric cultures, 164Brittany, 146Brixham Cave, 17, 35Bronze Age, 106-108, 123, 125, 142-143,

164

The Bronze Age (Gordon Childe), 123Brooches from the Bronze Age (Montelius),

106, 107, 108Buonodelmonti, Cristoforo, 14Burial mounds, 127

Cabot, Samuel, 50Calah, 46, 53, 56California, 165Callendar, Alexander, 90Camden, William, 16, 41-42Capitan, Louis, 87Carchemish, 117, 118-119Carnarvon, Lord, 72, 92-93Carter, Howard, 9, 72, 80, 90, 90-93, 92,

133Catalhoyiik, 173Catherwood, Frederick, 7, 47, 49, 50, 67Caton-Thompson, Gertrude, 72, 130, 132,

132-135, 139, 140, 143The Cave of Altamira at Santillana del Mar,

Spain (Breuil, Obermaier), 87Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, 114,

114-115Central America, 10, 49-50, 104-105, 109,

111, 112, 161, 162, 171Central Asia, 73, 113-116On Central Asian tracks (Stein), 116Champollion, Jean Francois, 45, 67de Chardin, Father Teilhard, 87, 127Chase, George, 103Chi, Li, 163Chichen Itza, 50, 105, 109, 111, 163Childe. See Gordon Childe, VereChina, 73, 114-115, 116, 127, 159, 163, 164Chippindale, Christopher, 21Christie, Agatha, 119Chronicles of the Kings of Kashmir (Stein), 114Cisbury Hill Iron Age fort, 75The Civilization of Sweden in Heathen Times

(Montelius), 107Clark, David, 168, 171Clark, Grahame, 129, 130, 131, 153,

153-156, 154, 157, 167, 168Clark, John Desmond, 131, 146, 157,

157-159Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde, 73Clottes, Jean, 173Colt Hoare, Sir Richard, 16, 42-43, 43Conkey, Margaret, 172-173Conservation of archaeological sites, 169Conze, Alexander, 71Cook, Basil, 158Copan, 111, 162, 169Cozumel, 50Crawford, O. G. S., 130, 163Crete, 72, 95, 98, 99Cro-Magnon people, 138-139Cross-dating method, 80

I N D E X 1 8 7

Cultural Resource Management (CRM), 8-9Culture history, 122The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia

(Rawlinson), 57Cuneiform script, 55-57Cunnington, William, 16, 42, 43Curtius, Ernst, 68, 71Cuvier, Jacques, 17Cuzco, 165

Danger Cave, 164The Danube in Prehistory (Gordon Childe),

122, 123Dart, Raymond, 164Darwin, Charles, 7, 17, 35, 106On the Dating of the Bronze Age, particularly

in relation to Scandinavia (Montelius), 106,107

Davis, Edwin, 46, 68Davis, Hester, 170Davis, Theodore, 92The Dawn of European Civilization (Gordon

Childe), 121, 123Dead Cities and Living Men (Woolley), 119Deetz, James, 170The Desert and the Sown (Bell), 83Desert West, 165Destruction of archaeological sites, 8-9, 75,

169Devil's Tower, 137Digging up Jericho (Kenyon), 143Diospolis Parva (Flinders Petrie), 81Direct Historicical Method, 7Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon

(Layard), 53Donnan, Chris, 173Dorpfeld, Wilhelm, 47, 66, 99Douglass, A. E., 73Drovetti, Bernardino, 30-31, 32, 45, 67Druids, 20-21

The Early Mesoamerican Village (Flannery),171

East Jerusalem, 143East Turkana, 152,171, 172Ecological archaeology, 156Edfu, 59Edwards, Emelia, 68, 69, 71, 98Egypt, 11, 45, 58-60, 72, 78-81, 90-93, 126,

130, 133, 134Egyptologists, 58, 67, 68, 72, 79, 91, 93, 103,

126, 127, 133, 172Egyptology, 78El-Kahun, 79Emeryville, 126Engendering Archaeology (Conkey, Gero,

eds.), 173Erligang, 164Esarhaddon's palace, 52Espiritu Pampa, 69Ethics of archaeology, 9Ethiopia, 131, 158, 168Ethiopian Rift, 159Europe, 12

Evans, Arthur John, 72, 80, 94, 94-97, 96,99, 101, 118

Evans, John, 17, 33, 33-36, 34, 36By the Evidence: Memoirs (Leakey, L.), 150Excavations at Star Carr (Clark, G.), 155, 156Excavations at Ur (Woolley), 119Excavations on Cranbome Chase (Pitt-

Rivers), 75, 77

Fayum Depression, 133, 135, 143Fiorelli, Giuseppi, 25Flannery, Kent, 168, 171Flinders Petrie, William Matthew, 7, 70, 72,

78-81, 79, 91, 126, 133, 141, 167Florida, 160Flotation methods, 164, 168, 171Ford, James A., 73, 127A Forest of Kings (Schele, Freidel), 172Fossey, Dian, 152Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art (Breuil),

87From Amurath to Amurah (Bell), 83

Gamble, Clive, 173Gamble's Cave, 148Gamio, Manuel, 127Gardner, Elinor, 133Garrod, Dorothy, 130, 136, 136-139, 156Garstang, John, 142Gendrosia, 115Gero, Joan, 173Ghurab, 80Giza, 59, 72, 78, 79, 172Global archaeology, 129Godwin, Harry, 154, 155Goodall, Jane, 152Gordon Childe, Vere, 73, 121-124, 124Gournia, 99, 99-100, 100Gournia, Vosiliki and Other Prehistoric Sites on

the Isthmus of lerapetra, Greece (Hawes,H.B.), 101

Great Basin, 165Great Basin archaeology, 164Great Britain, 12, 145-146Great Plains, 164Great Zimbabwe, 72, 130, 132, 133-134, 140Greece, 13Green, Roger, 170-171Grotte de Chauvet, 173Growth in archaeology, 167Guatemala, 49, 110, 125, 161Guibert, Abbe, 86, 87A Guide to the Northern Antiquities

(Thomsen), 27Guillieron, Emile, 96

Hadrian's Wall, 21, 118Hamilton, William, 42Hamoudi, Sheikh, 119Handbook of South American Indians (Willey,

ed.), 160Haram esh Sharif, 61-62Harappa, 146Harrappa, 115

Hatshepsut's mortuary temple, 59, 91, 127Haury, Emil, 164Haven, Samuel, 47, 67-68Hawass, Zahi, 172Hawes, Charles Henry, 100Hawes, Harriet Boyd, 72, 98-101, 99Hawkes, Christopher, 164Hazar Merd cave, 138Heizer, Robert, 165Herculaneum, 16, 22-24Hetepheres' tomb, 126Hewitt, Edgar, 102-103, 110Higgs, Eric, 164High-technology science, 7-8, 168Higham, Charles, 166, 168, 171-172Hincks, Edward, 56, 57Hissarlik mound. See TroyA History of American Archaeology (Willey,

Sobloff), 161, 162History of the Art of Antiquity

(Winckelmann), 23, 25Hodder, Ian, 173Hogarth, David, 99Hohokam culture, 164Holmes, William H., 69Homo ergaster, 151Homo sapiens sapiens, 136, 138Hooten, Ernest Albert, 104Hopi, 104L'Hote, Nestor, 58Hua Fteah, 165Hudson, Beatrice, 166Human cultural evolution, 123Human evolution, 130Hume, Ivor Noel, 173Huxley, Thomas Henry, 7, 17, 35, 43

Ice Age, 123, 129, 130, 133, 137, 138, 165Ice Age archaeology, 87Ice Age art, 86, 88-89, 172, 173Igbo Ukwo, 165Ilios (Schliemann), 65Incidents of Travel in Arabia Petraea

(Stephens), 49Incidents of Travel in Central America,

Chiapas, and Yucatan (Stephens), 49, 50Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (Stephens), 49,

50India, 114, 115, 146-147, 159, 170Indus civilization, 146Innermost Asia: Detailed Report of Explorations

in Central Asia, Ken-su, And Eastern Iran(Stein), 115

The Inscriptions of Copdn (Morley), 111The Inscriptions of Peten (Morley), 111Instruction of Musketry (Pitt-Rivers), 74, 75An Introduction to American Archaeology

(Willey), 161Introduction to the Archaeology of Cuzco

(Rowe), 165An Introduction to the Study of Suthwestem

Archaeology (Kidder), 103Invitation to Archaeology (Deetz), 170Iran, 46, 116, 133


Iraq, 45-46, 83, 115, 138Iron Age, 108, 129, 145, 146, 164, 165Iron Age hill forts, 154Isaac, Glynn, 159, 168, 171IshtarGate, 126Israel, 81Itinerarium Curiosum (Stukeley), 19-20

Jamestown, 173Jamo, 164Jefferson, Thomas, 42, 46Jennings, Jesse D., 164Jericho, 130, 132, 133, 140, 142-143Jerusalem, 61-63, 141, 142, 143Jewry Wall, 141Johanson, Don, 168, 172, 173Jordan, 133

Kalambo Falls prehistoric site, 131, 158The Kalambo Falls Prehistoric Site (Clark, JD),

159Karnak, 30, 59Kenya, 130, 148Kenyon, Dame Kathleen, 130, 139,

140-143, 141, 145Kerma, 126Kharga Oasis, 134Khorsabad, 45, 52-53, 56, 68Khotan Empire, 114Kidder, Alfred Vincent, 7, 73, 102, 102-105,

105, 110, 111, 126-127, 161Kikuyu people, 148-149Kirch, Patrick, 173Kivik burial mound, 38Knossos, 95-97Koldeway, Robert, 126Kossina, Gustaf, 126Koster, 170Kroeber, Alfred, 126-127Kuyunjik mounds, 46, 52

Laetoli hominid prints, 151-152de Landa, Diego, 41Landscape archaeology, 130Langdon, Stephen, 85Lapita culture, 170Lartet, Edouard, 87, 88Lawrence, T. E., 117, 118Layard, Austen Henry, 7, 46, 51-54, 52, 54,

56, 118Le Cotte de St. Brelade cave, 165Le Moustier, 88Leakey, Louis S. B., and Mary D., 130-131,

148-152, 149, 151, 157, 159, 167Leakey, Richard, 152, 172Legislation to protect archaeological sites,

170Lenormant, Charles, 58Lepsius, Karl Richard, 45, 68, 71Lewis-Williams, David, 173, 173Libby, Willard, 8Linear A, Linear B, 95-96London's Roman wall, 75Lovelock Cave, 165

Lubbock, Sir John, 27Lucy, 168, 172, 173Luxor, 30, 59, 60, 92, 133Lydney, 145Lyell, Sir Charles, 35

Machu Pichu, 47, 69Maclver, Randall, 134Maes How, 122Magdalenian culture, 88Maiden Castle, 128, 144, 145-146, 147, 157,

164Malawi, 159Mallowan, Max, 119, 147Malta, 133, 137Mal'ta, 164Mammoth Cave, 171Management of archaeological sites, 169Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians

(Wilkinson), 67Man's Place in Nature (Huxley), 43Marcus, Joyce, 168Mariette, Auguste, 45, 58, 58-60, 60, 78Marret, R. R., 137Martin's Hundred, 173Maudsley, Alfred P., 73, 125-126Maya, 47, 48, 49-50, 67, 73, 105, 109,

110-112, 125-126, 130, 161-162, 164,169, 172

McAdams, Robert, 170McBumey, Charles, 165McEnery, Father James, 35McGown, Theodore, 138Merekete's household, 127Meroitic civilization, 118Mesapotamia, 82, 83-85Mesoamerican civilization, 171The Mesolithic Age in Britain (Clark, G), 154,

155The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe

(Clark, G), 155Mesopotamia, 126, 170Method and Theory in American Archaeology

(Willey, Phillips), 160, 161Methods and Aims in Achaeology (Flinders

Petrie), 80, 81Mezhirich, 172Middle Zabezi Valley, 159Minoan civilization, 72, 94, 98Moche civilization, 173Moche Lords of Sipan, 169, 173Mohenjo-daro, 115, 146Mongolia, 115, 127, 164Montelius, Oscar, 17, 28, 40, 73, 106,

106-108, 108, 122, 125Morley, Sylvanus Griswold, 73, 103, 105,

109-112, 110de Mortillet, Gabrielle, 87, 88The Most Ancient East (Gordon Childe),

123Mosul, 45-46, 51, 68Mount Carmel caves, 130, 136, 138-139Mualia, Famaanu, 166Miiller, Sophus, 108, 125

Multidisciplinary archaeology, 169Mulvaney, John, 168Mumbwa Cave, 158Mummies, 79, 80, 172Murder in Mesopotamia (Christie), 119Mycenae, 66, 95Mycenae (Schliemann), 65

Nai, Xia, 164Naqada cemeteries, 80Narrative of the Operations and Recent

Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples,Tombs, and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia(Belzoni), 31

Native Americans, 46-47, 68, 73, 102,103-104, 165

The Native Races (Bancroft), 109Naukratis, 79Naville, Edouard, 91Neander Valley, 17Neanderthal people, 17, 88, 126, 137-139,

164Near East, 172Nelson, Nels, 103"New archaeology," 165, 168, 170New Light on the Most Ancient East (Gordon

Childe), 123New York, 165Newberry, Percy, 91, 126Niebuhr, Carsten, 42Nigeria: Its Archaeology and early History

(Shaw), 165Nile, 81, 103Nile Delta, 79Nile Valley, 11, 118, 130Nimrud, 47, 52, 55, 56Nineveh, 45-46, 51, 52-53, 55, 56, 68Nineveh and Babylon (Layard), 54Nineveh and Its Remains (Layard), 53Njoro River Cave, 149North Africa, 12North America, 8-9, 10, 162, 164, 165North American archaeology, 105, 165, 168Nubia, 126Nyerup, Rasmus, 16, 27, 43

Okladnikov, Aleksei Pavlovich, 164Old Kingdom tombs, 133On Old Routes of Western Iran (Stein), 116Oldowan culture, 151-152Olduvai Gorge, 131, 148, 149-152Olduvai Gorge: A Report on the Evolution of

the Hand-Axe Culture in Beds I-IV (Leakey,L), 150

Olduvai Gorge: My Search for Early Man(Leakey, M.), 151

Olduvai Gorge:, Vol. 3: Excavations inBeds I and 11, 1960-1963 (Leakey, M.),151

Ole Worm's Museum of Curiosities, 8Olorgesaillie, 149, 171Olympia, 68, 71Oppert, Jules, 57Origin of Species (Darwin), 7, 36, 75

I N D E X 1 8 9

Pachacamac, 126Pacific Ocean cultures, 173Pacific prehistory, 170Pakistan, 146Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir (Bell), 83Palace of Knossos, 72Palace of Minos, 36, 72, 94, 96, 96-97, 99The Palace of Minos at Knossos (Evans, A.J.),

95, 97Palenque, 49-50, 172The Paleolithic Societies of Europe

(Gamble), 173Palestine, 143Parkington, John, 168Peacock's Farm, 154, 154Pecos Pueblo, 73, 102, 103-104, 105Persia, 115-116"Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions at Behistun"

(Rawlinson), 56de Perthes, Jacques Boucher, 17, 35, 43Peru, 73, 126, 130, 160, 165, 167, 173Peten, 161-162Petra, 48, 49Petrie, William Matthew Flinders, see

Flinders Petrie, William MatthewThe Phenomenon of Man (de Chardin), 127Phillips, Philip, 160-161Photography, 7, 77Phylakopi, 172Piecing Together the Past (Gordon Childe),

123, 124Piette, Edouard, 87, 88Piggott, Stuart, 129, 164-165Pitt-Rivers, General Augustus Lane, 7, 70,

71, 74, 74-77, 78, 129, 145Pollen analysis, 129, 154, 155Pompeii, 16, 22-25Post-processual archaeology, 169, 173Potassium-argon dating, 150, 168La Prehistoire (Breuil), 87Prehistoric and Roman Wales (Wheeler),

145Prehistoric archaeology, 73, 87—89Prehistoric art, 89Prehistoric Cultures of the Horn of Africa

(Clark, J. D.), 158, 159Prehistoric Europe: the Economic Basis (Clark,

G.), 155Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in the Viru

Valley, Peru (Willey), 161Prehistory, 133The Prehistory of European Society (Gordon

Childe), 123, 124Prehistory of Southern Africa (Clark, J. D.),

159The Prehistory of Southern Africa (Clark, J.

D.), 159Prestwich, Joseph, 36The Primeval Antiquities of Denmark

(Worsaae), 37, 39Processual archaeology, 168-169Proconsul africanus, 149Proskouriakoff, Tatiana, 164Pueblo Bonito, 73

Pulak, Aemal, 171Pumpelly, Raphael, 102In Pursuit of the Past (Binford), 170Putnam, Frederick Ward, 102, 109Pyramid of Kephren, 31-32The Pyramid Survey 1880-82 (Flinders

Petrie), 79Pyramids, 132, 172Pyramids and Tombs of Egypt (Flinders Petrie),

78, 81

Qinshihuangdi's terra-cotta regiment, 169Qurna, 30, 31

Radiocarbon dating, 8, 130, 133, 156, 168Ramses II, 30, 32Rassam, Hormuzd, 46, 68-69Rawlinson, Henry Creswicke, 46, 53, 55-57,

56Reck, Hans, 148Redfield, Robert, 105Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in

Painting and Sculpture (Winckelmann), 23Reisner, George A., 103, 104, 126Relacion de las Cosa de Yucatan (de Landa), 41Relics of saints, 9Renfrew, Colin, 168, 172Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau

of Ethnology (Thomas), 68Rich, Claudius, 43Roman cemetery at Hawara, 79Roman sites, 130, 141Roman towns, 129Rosetta Stone, 45, 67Rowe, John, 165The Ruins of Desert Cathay (Stein), 114, 115Rusinga Island, 149

Sabloff, Jeremy A., 162Sabratha, 141Sahara, 159Salvage archaeology, 164, 165, 169Samaria, 140Samothrace, 71San Cristobal Pueblo, 103San hunter-gatherer art, 173Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan (Stein), 115Sanders, William, 162Sankalia, Hasmuk, 170Saqqara, 58-59Sargon II's palace, 46, 68de Sarzac, Ernest, 69, 69Scandinavia, 125, 155Schele, Linda, 169, 172Schliemann, Heinrich, 7, 47, 61, 64-66, 95Schliemann, Sophia, 99Scientific archaeology, 71-73Seagar, Rodney, 101Sennacherib's palace, 53-54Seti I's tomb, 31, 32Settlement archaeology, 130Shaw, Thurston, 165Shipwreck excavations, 171Silk Road, 73, 114, 115

Skara Brae, 122Skull 1470, 172In Small Things Forgotten (Deetz), 170Smith, George, 46Snaketown, 164Social, Evolution (Gordon Childe), 123Society of Antiquaries of London, 19Soffer, Olga, 172Solutrean culture, 88Somalia, 131, 158Somme Valley, 17South Africa, 167South America, 10, 73, 162Southeast Asia, 168Southern Africa, 158Southwest archaeology, 102-104Southwest Asia, 13Squier, Ephraim, 46, 68Stanwick Iron Age hill fort, 147Star Carr hunting camp, 129, 153, 155-156,

167Stein, Sir Aurel, 73, 113-116Stephens, John Lloyd, 7, 47, 48, 48-50, 162Still Digging: Leaves from an Antiquary's

Notebook (Wheeler), 145Stone Age, 108, 123, 124, 125, 127, 129,

130, 131, 133, 134, 138, 148-149, 155,158-159, 164

Stone Age archaeologists, 72Stone Age archaeology, 87, 88, 126, 157The Stone Age Cultures of Kenya Colony

(Leakey, L.), 148, 150The Stone Age Cultures of Northern Rhodesia

(Clark, JD), 158, 159The Stone Age of Mount Camel (Garrod,

Bate), 139Stonehenge, 16, 18-20, 41, 43, 78, 169Stonehenge, A Temple Restored to the British

Druids (Stukeley), 19Stonehenge (Stukeley), 20Stratified occupation mounds, 127Strong, William Duncan, 160, 164Struever, Stuart, 170Study of Archaeology (Taylor), 165Stukeley, William, 16, 18-21, 20"The Subdivisions of the Upper Paleolithic

and Their Significance" (Breuil), 88Sumerian civilization, 69The Survey of Western Palestine (Warren), 63

Taklamakan Desert, 113Tanis, 79Taxila, 146Tayler, Walter W, 165Teamwork archaeology, 169Tell el-Hesi, 81Tent Work in Palestine (Warren), 63Teotihuacan, 127, 127Thailand, 171Theban necropolis, 126Thomas, Cyrus, 68, 73Thompson, Edward H., 109, 163, 163Thompson, J. Eric, 164Thomsen, Christian Jurgensen, 16, 17, 26-28


The Thousand and One Churches (Bell,Ramsey), 83

A Thousand Miles up the Nile (Edwards), 70Three Age System, 16, 26, 26-28, 37, 39,

40Tiglath-Pileser's palace, 52Tikal, 111Tobias, Philip, 151The Tomb of Tut.ankh. Amen (Carter, Mace),

93Tozzer, Alfred Marsten, 109, 110, 161Travels (Bartram), 42Tree-ring dating, 8, 73, 168Tropical Africa, 131, 132, 134-135, 168Troy, 7, 14, 47, 64, 65-66Troy and Its Remains (Schliemann), 65Tulum, 50Turville-Petre, Francis, 137Tutankhamun's funerary feast, 127Tutankhamun's tomb, 72, 81, 90, 92-93,

133

Uaxacttin, 111Uhle, Max, 126Uluburun, 169, 171Undeground Jerusalem (Warren), 63Underwater archaeology, 171Upper Nile, 159

The Upper Paleolithic Age in Britain (Garrod),137, 139

Upper Zambezi Valley, 131Ur, 72, 84-85, 116, 117, 119-120, 120Ur of the Chaldees (Wooley), 120Ur Royal Cemetery, 119-120Urban Revolution, 123, 124Uxmal, 50

Valley of the Golden Mummies, 172Valley of Mexico, 168Valley of Oaxaca, 168Van Giffen, Albert R, 127Ventris, Michael, 97Verulamium, 140, 145Vilcabamba, 69Voyage dans k Haute Egypte (Mariette), 59

Ward-Perkins, John, 141Warren, Charles, 46, 61-63, 62, 81Watson, Patty Jo, 171Welsh archaeology, 145What Happened in History (Gordon Childe),

123Wheeler, Sir Mortimer, 71, 77, 128, 129,

130, 131, 140-141, 144-147, 157, 164,170

White, Marion, 165

White, Tim, 168, 172Wilkinson, John Gardner, 45, 67Willey, Gordon R., 73, 129-130, 160-162,

161, 167Williamsburg, 173Winckelmann, Johan Joachim, 16, 22-25Winlock, Herbert E., 127Woodbury, Richard, 160Woolley, Sir Leonard, 72-73, 78, 84-85, 93,

116, 117, 117-120Wor Barrow ditch excavations, 76, 76-77World prehistory, 139World Prehistory (Clarke), 130, 155, 156Worsaae, Jacob Jens A., 16-17, 22, 24, 28,

37-40, 106

Yaxchilan, 164

Zambesi River, 158Zapotecs, 168Zarzi cave, 138Zettupeh Cave, 137-138Zimbabwe. See Great ZimbabweThe Zimbabwe Culture: Ruins and reactions

(Caton-Thompson), 133Zinjanthropus boisei 131, 150-151, 159

Picture Credits

American Museum of Natural History: 48; American School of Classical Studies at Athens, HeinrichSchliemann Papers, Gennadius Library: 64; Courtesy, Arizona State University: 127; © Art Resource: 60;Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford: cover inset left, 94, 96, 147; ATA Stockholm: 38; © Jen & DesBartlett/Bruce Coleman Inc.: 149; © Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana: 14; Bibliotheque nationale de France:24, 41; Bibliotheque Royale de Belgique: 9; Bodleian Library: 18, 20; Bitish Academy: 132; © The BritishLibrary: 56, 69; British Museum: 52, 120; © C/Z Harris: cover; Courtesy Carnegie Institution of Washington:110; The Cleveland Museum of Natural History and Professor Donald Johanson: 173; Egypt ExplorationSociety London: 68, 79, 80; Courtesy Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc.Drawing by Linda Schele, © David Schele,:172; Courtesy Charles Higham: 166; The Illustrated LondonNews Picture Library: 165; Institute of Nautical Archaeology, © Don A. Frey: 171; Griffith Institute, Oxford:90, 92; National Geographic Society/© Robert F. Sisson: 151; NationalMuseum, Stockholm: 22, 26; © TheNatural History Museum, London: 138; New York Public Library: 8, 29, 32, 34, 54, 86, 88, 105, 108, 113,114, 117, 125, 135, 144, 154; Palestine Exploration Fund Photographic Archive: 61, 62, 142; PeabodyMuseum, Harvard University: (N35753)102, (N36010)161, (N35551)163; © Pitt Rivers Estate: 74, 136;© Pitt Rivers Estate-Anthony Pitt Rivers-for image 1326: 76; Reunion des Musees Nationaux / Art Resource,NY: 58; Roget-Viollet: 44; © Royal Society: 33; © Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum: 70; Smith CollegeArchives: 99; © Society of Antiquaries/Photograph provided by English Heritage/National MonumentsRecord: 128; South Austrailia Museum: 153; Reprinted with the kind permission of the Principal and Fellowsof St Hugh's College, Oxford: cover inset top right, 3, 141; © TimePix: cover inset bottom right; CourtesySigurd Towrie, www.orkneyjar.com: 127; University College London, Institute of Archaeology Archives,1938, Papers of Vere Gordon Childe, Notebook 9, Box N9: 124; University of Chicago Special Collections:131; University of Newcastle upon Tyne: 82, 84; University of Pennsylvania Museum (neg. S4-144059): 100;Uppsala University: 106; Wiltshire Archaeological Society: 43

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www.orkneyjar.com

Brian Fagan is a professor of anthropology at the University of California,Santa Barbara. He is internationally known for his more than forty bookson archaeology, among them The Adventure of Archaeology, The Rape of theNile, The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, Eyewitness to Discovery, andAncient North America. He is the general editor of the Oxford UniversityPress series Digging for the Past, which explores archaeological sites aroundthe world.

archaeologists explorers of the human past

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