Even More Graves of Archaeologists

Way back in the day when I was a more dedicated blogger, I did some posts about the graves of archaeologists (here and here and here [not an archaeologist, but whatever]). I always meant to follow up with some additional posts but, as happens, I never got around to it. I still think it's an interesting project, though, so I thought it would be worth returning to.

Here we go:

John Pendlebury's story has reached truly historic and heroic proportions. He was a British archaeologist associated with the British School next door to the American School. He worked at two of the most famous Mediterranean excavations EVAH, Tell el-Amarna in Egypt and Knossos on Crete. During WWII, he stayed on Crete as a British spy and in so doing won the hearts of Crete's entire population. The story goes that nobody on Crete knew who the hell Sir Arthur Evans was, but they all knew Pendlebury. He was wounded and captured during the German assault on Crete. The Germans stood him up against a cottage wall and shot him through the head. He's buried at the Commonwealth cemetery at Souda Bay.

Like Pendlebury, George Mylonas had his own war story. A soldier during the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), he was captured as a POW. His Smyrna-based family lost virtually everything in the war, but he went on to become a prominent archaeologist in Greece. He was a student of David Robinson at Olynthus and in the late '20s he even served as the Bursar of the American School in Athens. He's most famous for directing the excavations at Mycenae - he's the guy who led the excavation of Grave Circle B. He's buried down the hill from Mycenae in the same little cemetery as Humpfrey Payne. Like the Blegen's grave in the First Cemetery in Athens, Mylonas' sarcophagus is decked out in a way that links him to the ancient peoples he studied - the spiral-y things running along the bottom are a decorative motif visible in Mycenean art. (I'd like to thank Vassiliki Pliatsika for providing me with the pictures of Mylonas' grave. Thanks!)

And just as a quick note, there are many more graves of archaeologists and classicists in the First Cemetery that need to be documented. For example, if you feel like stopping by, visit these people (courtesy of Dan Leon):

Arnold Hugh Martin Jones (1904-1970) - Author of "The Later Roman Empire, 284-602" and apparently popular with all the Late Antiquity peeps, even if he wasn't big on archaeology. He had a heart-attack on a boat on his way to deliver a series of lectures in Thessaloniki.

Adolf Furtwaengler [whom I've already noted - but it doesn't hurt to give him further props] (1853-1907) - Wrote a dissertation on vase painting, was instrumental in the development of the 'comparative method,' participated in the excavations at Olympia, and co-authored the first corpus of pottery finds ever (Mykenische Thongefaesse, from Aegina).  He helped to come up with the idea of using pottery and stratigraphy to create a chronology.  He wrote a bunch of stuff on vase painting and sculpture, ran a few museums and digs, published a monograph on Aegina, but contracted dysentery there and died.

Gregory Vlastos (1907-1991) - Possibly the Gregory Vlastos who published widely on pre-Socratic, Socratic, and Platonic philosophy and is credited by some with bringing about a renewed interest in Plato in the philosophical community.

Interview with Ron Stroud Part 1.2

A while back I posted the first part of my on-going interview with Ron Stroud, in honor of the Regular Year Members of 1959-60. Unfortunately, I left out part of it! So here is the last fascinating tidbit associated with the first part of our interview. It's short but definitely sweet. I asked Ron how he traveled to Greece and what it was like - plane, train, what? He answered:

"I traveled from New York to Athens in August 1959 on the Greek liner, Queen Frederiki.

The Queen Frederica in 1967. For an idea of what the experience would have been like, check out this awesome video.

Pierre MacKay and the other Fulbrighters came on the other Greek liner, the Olympia. Also on the Frederiki were fellow-students Bill Wyatt, and his wife Sandra, Jim Wiseman (his wife Lucy came later), Patrick Henry and possibly one or two others. Fellow passengers were the new Director of Athens College, Dr. Rice and his wife, and the Greek poet, Athanasios Maskelaris, from whom I had Modern Greek lessons on board. The trip took 14 days and we all got the false impression that the long journey was almost over as soon as we cleared Gibraltar, but then we stopped in Barcelona, Palermo (where WW II bombing was still very evident), Naples, and Messina and it seemed to take forever to get to Peiraieus.

I was in a cabin in the very bottom of the ship with five old Greek men who had recently retired and were returning to their villages to live off the proceeds of their US Social Security. I was the only non-Greek at our table for eight, which was provided for lunch and dinner with a large flagon of very bitter retsina. The menu for lunch and dinner was printed in Greek and English and I still have one as a souvenir.

Queen Frederica menu from the 1960s.

We had a Greek orchestra, Greek dances, and Greek movies every evening; I remember Melina Mercouri in "Stella." I relieved the boredom of the journey by a shipboard romance with a young American woman who was sailing to join her parents in Athens, where her father worked for the CIA, and she was going to join the US Economic Mission. The Truman plan was still very active in Greece and the US Mission had taken over the huge city block occupied by the Tameion Building, just off Syntagma, and containing the swish watering hole Zonars, where many Americans hung out. The US Embassy was at Vasilissis Sophias and Herodes Atticus, catty-corner from the Benaki Museum and across the street from the headquarters of the Evzones.

Greece was not in sight on the eve of our arrival but I was too excited to sleep and around 3.00 a.m. went down the hall outside our cabin to where a member of the crew was standing smoking next to a large open door. The sea was rushing by and on the horizon barely visible was the outline of a mountain. "Ellada[Greece]" he said laconically. It was Cape Malea and he seemed as excited to be here as I was.

We were met at the dock in Peiraieus by Colin Edmonson, the Secretary of the School. The Secretary normally met arriving members of the School in those days. We had little baggage, because you had to go down to Customs to clear your belongings the next day, so Colin bundled us all into the School Land Rover, a venerable gray vehicle, with a large spare tire on the hood, that had been donated by Dr. George Miles of the American Numismatic Society, father of Mimsy Miles and future father-in-law of the future Director, James McCredie. It so happened that McCredie himself was there with Edmonson because they had been out on a topographic excursion with Arthur Steinberg. The reason I mention these three is that as we drove into Athens and the Acropolis loomed into sight, we all in the back seats were stretching our necks and uttering excited exclamations, while Edmonson, McCredie, and Steinberg merely drove by without looking. Hardened veterans."

The Parthenon in 1959. This amazing picture from here.

Interview with Ron Stroud: Part I

As this is the academic year 2009-2010, it is the 50th anniversary of the ASCSA's Class of 1959 Regular Year Students. In honor of our scholarly forefathers who came to Greece then, I decided to do a series of interviews commemorating that year. The first interview I did was with Pierre MacKay, who accompanied us students on several of the school trips we took during my own Regular Year in the autumn of 2009. You can check out the results of his interview here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

My second interview has been a bit longer in coming, no doubt given my change in method. Pierre I was able to interview in person and record on my iPod. (Although the archaeologist in me hopes this recording is preserved forever, the first-time interviewer in me cringes at the idea that someone else might hear how moronic I sound on that tape. Does my laugh really sound like that? Oh god.) My second interview, in contrast, has been over email, so it has taken a bit longer to compile and is far from finished. But, I figured I'd go ahead and get the first portion posted since it's been a while since I talked about ASCSA history on this blog. So let's get to it.

My second interview subject is none other than Ron Stroud. Like Pierre, he came to Greece as a student of Kendrick Pritchett from UC Berkeley. Some of you may know him as one of the forces behind the monumental SEG (Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum), one of the excavators of the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Corinth, and a fan of ancient curse tablets. To others, he is an ASCSA legend both as a scholar and as an American School member famous for his general awesomeness and hard-core-osity. I met Ron in the fall of last year, and to me and the other Regular Members, he was more simply a Master of Storytelling, always willing over dinner to share tales full of high drama, adventure, wit and humor. Hopefully I can in turn share some of his gems with you over the course of the interview. As with Pierre, most of my initial questions pertain specifically to the experience of being a Regular Member in 1959. Here we go.

Ron Stroud tells stories about excavating at Corinth, in front of the Wall of Fame in Hill House's library.

What made you decide to do the Regular Year Program? Had you ever been to Greece before? The short answer to this, as to almost everything else about my career as a classicist, is a teacher. This time it was Kendrick Pritchett in Berkeley who was very active in the affairs of the School. I had completed two years of graduate work at Berkeley and did not yet have a dissertation project though I was leaning toward something in Greek history, epigraphy, or archaeology. He counseled me that if this is what I wanted to do, it was imperative to go to Athens as a Regular Member, participate fully in all aspects of the program, and stay in Greece for as long as I could. Like most of my fellow-graduate students at the time (1959), I had never been to Greece or any other part of Europe. At his urging, I took the School fellowship exams in February of 1959, was lucky enough to win the Seymour Fellowship, and doubly lucky because I also won a fellowship from the Canada Council and, unusually, both institutions allowed me to hold both fellowships, which meant at the outset that if I saved my lepta [pennies], I could probably afford to stay two years.

What impression did you get from Athens and particularly Kolonaki when you arrived? What was it like? How has the area changed since 1959? Anyone walking through Kolonaki today would never guess what it was like in 1959. The square itself could be a bit dusty at times, for it was dirt in the center, unpaved and surrounded by trees, sometimes in hot summer afternoons sounding with the same cooing doves that one still hears in the ASCSA gardens. After strong winter rains, it could also be a bit muddy. Remember also that in 1959 the mad craze to tear down the lovely old Neo-Classical houses that graced most parts of Athens had not yet set in. The square was still mostly surrounded by these. So there were no glass-fronted shoe stores, or upscale bars, or Goody's. The kiosks also looked a bit more Ottoman than their modern overstuffed counterparts. Kolonaki's most conspicuous feature in my memory was the "Byzantion", a large kaffeneion [cafe-bar for men], open-fronted in the summer with lots of wooden cane-chairs spread all over the sidewalk on the west side of the square. Many very picturesque old, bearded gentlemen could be seen there all day (except for siesta) and all evening slamming down playing cards on the tables, shouting politics at each other, and smoking out of water-cooled hookas, for which they brought their own mouthpieces, much like professional snooker players who bring their own cues to a billiard parlor. This was unequivocally a male preserve, in fact very few women even dared to walk along the sidewalk on the west side of the plateia. This added to the mystery and wonder of an apparition I viewed there once coming home late across the square. It was after 2.00 a.m. on a hot summer night. The lights in the Byzantion were still on and there were still a few denizens inside. Outside, however, occupying the traditional five chairs (one for her bottom and two for the arms and one each for her long, slim, tanned legs), wearing a long, sleeveless white dress, was Melina Mercouri, having a nightcap and a smoke, alone. I couldn't believe it. I just stood there and gawked like a Groupie. There was "Stella." This was long before her days in "Never on Sundays" or local and international politics, the Elgin Marbles, etc. She used to live just around the corner from the School.

There were very few cars in Kolonaki in 1959, which made even more conspicuous the arrival of the old Marasleion bus that rattled through the square several times a day. There were also a number of horse-drawn carts of junk-dealers, vegetable merchants, and always, every day, a man on foot selling brooms and shouting, "Skoupie," in a voice that could have been heard as far away as the Plaka. Many of the other itinerant merchants shouted out the names of their wares and led heavily laden donkeys. Also, every few days a man would come through with a dancing bear, an accordion, and a monkey carrying an open hat for donations.

I saw a lot of this in my very first days in Athens, for Loring Hall had not yet reopened after the summer break and I had to stay at the fabled Pension [hotel] Suisse on Neophytou Vamva, just off the Plateia. Here I met Wade-Gery and Paul Alexander and the formidable private secretary of Queen Frederica, a permanent resident, who owned the large Liddell-Scott [Ancient Greek Dictionary] and lectured me on the absurdity of the Erasmian pronunciation of ancient Greek. Like many others over the years I enjoyed the wonderful hospitality of the proprietor Loukianos ("Kyrios Lucien") Polykandriotis from Trebizond and his wife Olympia (the best cook in Athens at the time, in my view). I later became their friend and Lucien came to our wedding in Athens in 1963. But that is a whole other story and the history of the Pension Suisse needs to be
written in full.

Could you tell me a little more about this Pension, since I have not heard of it? The Pension Suisse had roughly ten rooms, an elegant 19th century sitting room, a large dining room. They served an enormous three course lunch, with lots of wine, every day and a simple dinner every evening except Sundays. I remember glorious siestas there in the heat of an Athenian summer in those lovely old rooms with very high ceilings and the curtains wafting in whatever little bit of breeze came up. I used to stay there a lot in later years. Lucien was a wonderful raconteur, read Anna Comnena almost daily, and had a small but potent collection of Byzantine silver coins, which had been in his family and which he managed to salvage from the wreckage that drove him out of Trebizond to Athens. My last memories of it, after it moved from Kolonaki to Alkmanos Street near the Canadian Archaeological School, were in March 1969 when my family and I arrived there after driving through a very cold, wet, rainy Italy, with a very sick one-year old son (allergic to wheat, eggs, milk, and meat--great fun feeding him in restaurants), my three-year-old daughter, and Connie. We took the ferry from Brindisi to Patras and had planned to drive that evening to Athens where we had booked rooms at the Pension. By the time we reached Patras, however, Connie was so sick, having picked up all the germs and earaches that my daughter and I had finally shed, that she literally could not walk. I had to carry her from the car to a motel room outside Patras. The next day she was even worse and when we finally made it to the Pension, I had to carry her up two flights of stairs. To say the least, my family was in tatters. It was getting close to Easter when Olympia always used to get pretty nervous thinking about all the cooking she had to do, Christ on the Cross, rising from the dead, etc. But she and her family just took us all to their bosoms. They had a doctor there for Connie within 15 mins., Olympia and the maids just embraced my two children and actually baby-sat my whole family for more than a week while I went out during the day foraging for an apartment for my sabbatical. Salt of the earth human beings.

In "My Family and Other Animals" Gerald Durrell talks about the place where the Durrell family used to stay on Corfu also called the "Pension Suisse" and Connie and I actually stayed there over the Christmas break when we were digging year-round in the Demeter Sanctuary at Corinth in 1964/5. The only thing it had in common with its Kolonaki counterpart was the name.

Once the school year started, did you live in Loring Hall and where? Yes, after it reopened following the summer break, I lived in Loring Hall in the West Wing main floor about midway down the hall between the door and the bathrooms. My maid was "Old Maria," a bustling cleaner-upper, who made the bed every morning, changed the sheets once a week, took my laundry away on Tuesday and and brought it back on Friday, and "straightened up" all the keys, belongings, books, etc. on the dressing table, and made sure my shoes were in order under the bed. She had a terrible time with my neighbor, David Mitten from Harvard who was an assiduous sherder. In those days one was actually encouraged to pick up sherds and bring them back to place in the School's sherd collection, which was kept in the basement of the Main Building. David returned from all the Fall Trips, the Friday Trips, and any other personal outings with large numbers of unwashed and often muddy sherds that he used to dump on the top of his dressing table much to Maria's despair.

Before dealing with Loring Hall in more detail, however, I have to tell the story of my first full day in Greece in September 1959. My teacher, Kendrick Pritchett was at the School at that time and he invited me to join him on an excursion to Marathon on which he was then preparing a monograph. Evelyn Smithson, a professor from Buffalo who came to Athens every summer to work on the publication of the Geometric pottery from the Agora Excavations, joined us. Pritchett had rented a car and I got my first glimpse of the Attic countryside as we drove out. At Marathon, we climbed Mount Agrieliki, picked up some Geometric sherds, and saw Byron's famous view, "The mountains look down on Marathon..." We went to Vrana where the present museum was built much later and where Soteriades had dug a lot of Classical graves, then we walked quite a bit across what was then a totally empty plain to the Soros--no weekend villas, no posh hotels, no fences, no orchards, nothing but fields of wheat stubble and vegetables and few olive trees and sheep. I remember Pritchett stopping, as his pipe went out yet again, and saying, "Mr. Stroud [we were still on formal pupil/teacher terms at that point] we are walking across sacred ground!" We walked some more after visiting the Soros and found at the shore the only "structure" in sight. It was actually a tiny hut or lean-to that an old geezer had built. Inside he had a little gas stove on which he was grilling a great fish (a synagrida) that he had caught in the Bay of Marathon that morning. It smelled delicious. It was only than that we happily noticed the letters scrawled in chalk on one side of this little hut, "EXOKIKON KENTRON" which meant that we had reached a commercial establishment and we could pay for our seafood lunch. He also had FIX beer in the old blue label bottles that was icy cold. I couldn't believe it. This glorious lunch next to the sea, sitting on the grass, with the ghosts of the Marathonomachoi [warriors of the Battle of Marathon] only a few meters away. I returned that evening to the Pension Suisse where I was staying and excitedly told Kyrios Lucien about my day. What a fantastic first day in Hellas!

This was followed two days later, however, by an interlude that was not quite so pleasant. Pritchett, bless his heart, had wanted to help his student in any way he could, so he invited me to come to the garden of the French School at 6.00 p.m. where he had been invited for a cocktail by the Director Georges Daux and Mrs. Daux. The latter was one of the most elegant ladies in Athens and Daux himself was a scholar of great repute but also a formidable presence. I didn't even own a suit, let alone a summer suit. So clad in a heavy cream colored sports jacket that desperately need dry cleaning and gray flannels that were coming apart at the cuffs, I tentatively rang the bell at the front gate of the French School on Didotou Street. The thyroros led me to a flowery sector of the garden where seated in all their splendor were the Daux and Pritchett with one empty chair beside them. Daux in a spotless white suit rose to greet me and I was introduced to Mrs. Daux who looked like something out of Vogue magazine. To make it even worse, my Professor, as I knew before, was a connoisseur of fine wines, champagnes, madeiras, and all the rest. So I was offered a huge array of potent drinks, many of which I had never even heard of before. I was scared stiff, but the Daux quickly realized it and they loved Pritchett, so that they made every effort to put me at ease. Not a chance.

Luckily I was savvy enough not to gulp down what was in my glass but to take only a few sips and to hold onto it half empty until it was time to leave. Later in life, I became good friends with Daux and during a long rainy afternoon together in Berkeley many years thereafter we joked about our first encounter, but it was far from amusing for me at least at the time.

Stay tuned for Part 1.2 and Part 2.

More Graves of Archaeologists

So, to continue with one of my many half-finished side projects, it's time to document a few more archaeologists' graves in Greece. (Previous entries: 1, 2)

Last time, Bill Caraher informed me that the 'Big O' Oscar Broneer and his wife were buried in Corinth, so I wrote to Guy Sanders* to find out more about late members of the Corinth crew.

Oscar Broneer and his wife Verna are buried at the Church of Agia Anna, on the north side of the village of Old Corinth. Guy snapped some pictures for me and he relates that "the Broneers are in the NE corner in a plot granted in perpetuity in gratitude for the relief work he and Verna did in the community after WWII."

Oscar Broneer. Note that many of the graves of foreigners in Greece list both the place of their birth and the place of their death.

Verna's tombstone with a relief carving of an ancient lamp and an actual lamp in metal. Incidentally, the Broneer's son Jon Winroth became a famous international wine critic, although he first spent time studying fortresses built by Ali Pasha in Greek Epirus.

Broneer is one of those Greek archaeological giants. He was the Professor of Archaeology (i.e. pre-Mellon Professor) and his stint as the excavation director of Corinth and Isthmia has been called one "of the most shining chapters of the American School's excavations... (p.170)." He published the first typology of ancient lamps (see Verna's grave above) and, as all the internet blurbs about him relate, on his very first day of excavating at the site of the Isthmian Games he discovered the Temple of Poseidon. Not bad. Nowadays, Broneer's name will be recognizable to all poor, desperate graduate students, since the Broneer Fellowship is much sought after by those who want to study in Athens or Rome.

The other late Corinthian still residing in the area is Darrell Amyx. Like Broneer, Amyx got his PhD from Berkeley and in fact went on to found the History of Art Department there. He became a big fan of studying vase-painting a la Beazley - Morelli , attempting to identify the hand of specific painters. His ashes, Guy tells me, were spread over Akrocorinth.

Archaeologists having 'buchman' (snack time) beneath Akrocorinth.

As a final note, one of Corinth's finest is also buried in the First Cemetery in Athens. Theodore Woolsey Heermance is about as Old School American School as you can get. The "gruff, red-bearded professor" had already started excavating at Corinth by 1896 and was in the trenches throughout the early Teens.

Heermance's excavation notebook from 1903, Corinth Notebook #19 (courtesy of the digitized notebooks on the ASCSA site!).

Plus, you can buy his 1901 book Greek Art for $175 on Ebay!

*Thanks, Guy!

The Graves of Archaeologists

I was just looking over Troels Myrup's blog Iconoclasm and noticed a post he did a few months back entitled 'Staying Behind.' It featured the gravestone of G.L. Harding and reflected on the fact that many foreign archaeologists end up being buried in the land where they dug, rather than the one in which they were born.

While I was on the Regular Program, I tried to document all the graves of archaeologists that we came across. Some are buried on the very site they excavated:

Ekrem Akurgal, one of the most important experts on Turkish archaeology, is buried at the site of Old Smyrna (in the modern city of Izmir). Check him out in this video.

Humfrey Payne is buried just down the hill from Mycenae. He was the director of the British School from 1929 until 1936 when he died of blood poisoning. His wife was Dilys Powell, a journalist who also wrote the pithy Villa Ariadne, a lively view of the archaeologists who worked at Knossos. Humfrey Payne also excavated the Sanctuary of Hera at Perachora where I gave a site report.

The gravestones of many archaeologists reference the ancient world or the work they did in life:

Carl and Elizabeth Blegen, whom I have discussed numerous times on this site, are buried beneath a headstone that mimics the grave stelae from Mycenae.

The grave of Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy and Mycenae is of course the most recognizable example of this. His tomb, in the shape of a temple, is decorated with scenes from the mythic Greek past and also with scenes of excavation. Ancient and modern heroics.

An extraordinary number of famous names are buried together in the First Cemetery in Athens. Because the cemetery is Orthodox, the burials of the non-Orthodox (foreigners) are separated off by a fence. Walking through that collection of graves is an exceedingly strange experience. Headstone after headstone bears a familiar name. Famous archaeologists from the earlier days of the discipline lie beside others who have made a more recent impact.

William Bell Dinsmoor, for example, is famous for his architectural studies. His son (also named William Dinsmoor) followed in his footsteps, and I always have to do a double take when I see their names, just to make sure I'm looking at Sr. or Jr. Whenever I hear them mentioned, I will always think of Margie Miles saying 'Dinsmoor' while pointing up to some architectural oddity.

Adolf Furtwangler is a total legend. His impact on the study of the ancient world was enormous. John Boardman remarked that he was "probably the greatest classical archaeologist of all time."

Eugene Vanderpoole was the Mellon Professor (the Professor of Archaeology) at the School exactly 50 years ago. It was he who dragged Pierre McKay all over Greece. As Kostis Kourelis has pointed out, his house was considered something of an architectural superstar in Athens. I most frequently heard about Vanderpool in reference to life at the School during WWII. He was placed in a concentration camp and survived, but his health was never the same after. Whereas Furtwangler was a legend for his scholarship, in the many tales that I heard, Vanderpool was an altogether different sort, a giant, much beloved, a war hero. His presence and heroism still hang over the School, especially in the tender words of those who remember him.

And then there is Bert Hodge Hill and his wife Ida Thallon Hill. Ida has always been of great interest to me because of her pioneering role as one of the first women to ever excavate on the Greek mainland. The physical presence (books, furniture, etc.) that the Hills and Blegens left at the American School is of endless fascination to me. But most importantly of all, the Hills paid for me to attend the Regular Year Program by generously endowing a fellowship. Thank you, Bert Hodge Hill!

While at the American School, the monumental personages buried there at the First Cemetery became much more than names to me. They suddenly became the teachers and mentors of friends and of my own teachers and mentors. They became the topics of stories, reminiscences and School myth. They stopped being just recognizable names on book covers and beneath article titles. They're no longer just bibliography.

The First Cemetery is extraordinary for the simple fact that it preserves and also recreates a community. Granted, most of the people in that fenced-off section were of the same social class, almost all were foreigners, and all were non-Orthodox (mostly Protestant and Catholic) - they were already bound to run in the same circles. But a large percentage were part of an intellectual family tree, a community with connections across nationalities and zig-zagging relationships down through decade after decade. They're all there together under the shady pine trees. Young archaeologists can visit the First Cemetery and literally see their social and academic ancestry there before them. Name after name is instantly recognizable and meaningful. It occurs to me that nowhere else in the world will I ever know so many names of the dead in one place, in one cemetery. Nowhere else will I have so many connections to so many headstones.

What an odd and uncanny thing!

Dear Virginia, Merry Christmas

Up until this season at the Corinth excavations, I had never read any Agatha Christie. I've never been much of a crime/mystery novel reader - that's my aunt and grandmother, whereas I lean towards speculative fiction. I guess Agatha Christie doesn't really need much introduction, since she is the world's top-selling author EVER. Her books come second only to the Bible in popularity, with over 4 billion sold. And now I can join the 4 billion readers of Agatha Christie.

What's interesting about Christie, though, is that she was familiar with the life archaeological. The mystery author was lucky enough to work at the excavation of Ur and Nineveh, and her book Murder in Mesopotamia is set in an archaeological dighouse. In the 30s she married Max Mallowan, a British archaeologist who was even director of the BSA in Iraq. Christie wrote all about being part of an archaeological family in her book, Come, Tell Me How You Live - she had worked with her husband in the field, keeping notebooks and mending excavated pottery.

Christie with Leonard Woolley and her husband Max Mallowan at Ur.

Like Loring Hall in Athens, Corinth has a few book shelves filled with novels left behind by visitors and more permanent residents. A few of those novels are by Christie, and I decided to go for the Orient Express because it was the most recognizable to me. When I opened up Christie's book, I saw this:

It's not uncommon to find names scrawled on the inside covers of ASCSA novels. Some of them, in fact, can go pretty far back, like this one from Doreen Spitzer:



Spitzer was a long time member of the ASCSA community and Trustee of the School. Cosy (her nickname) signed this book in 1966 and left inside a draft of a little rhyming poem, written as an introduction for the president of Bryn Mawr College.

Virginia Grace, who signed her Agatha Christie book one year before she died, is something of an archaeological celebrity (read her biography here). She first came to the American School in 1927, the same year as Lucy Shoe Merritt, with whom she became travel buddies. She ended up spending most of her life in Athens, and most of that would be dedicated to studying the stamps on amphora handles.


She collected drawings of the little stamps and catalogued over 25,000 of them...This may sound incredibly boring...In fact, apparently everyone else thought it WAS boring, since no one else came up with the idea to study them in such detail. Basically, Virginia Grace single-handedly started the specialized sub-field of amphora stamp analysis and typology.

But why the hell would anyone want to study them?

The amphora stamps tell where and when an amphora was made. Amphorae themselves are like the ancient version of wooden barrels, filled with wine, salt fish, olive oil, or some other trade good. They were stacked in the holds of ancient ships and sent all over the Mediterranean. They have become especially important for underwater archaeology; more often than not, although wooden ships don't always survive, their resting place on the seabed can be identified by clusters of amphorae. And thanks to Virginia Grace, archaeologists can date these shipwrecks by the amphora stamps .



Even at my very first excavation in 2001 I heard about a little old lady who had lived in Athens and collected notecards with amphorae stamps. At the end of excavation seasons archaeologists would bring Virginia drawings of newly excavated stamped-handles, so that she might add them to her notecard collection. For decades Virginia Grace was at the center of a social and professional network stretching out in all directions, extended by each archaeologist who looked at an ancient amphora thousands of miles away and immediately thought of her. She was an eternal hub at the center of a remarkable net, anchored down in the storeroom of the Agora excavations at Athens. (And yes, I know, she even inspired me to mix my metaphors.)

ASCSA picture of Virginia Grace in Turkey, WWII.

I heard a lot about Virginia Grace this year from women at the School, often during Loring Hall's long, extended 2-hour lunches, Mediterranean-style. Virginia was apparently a willowy, beautiful woman, meticulous and organized, who loved living abroad. In WW II she was one of many archaeologists to be part of the O.S.S., America's wartime intelligence service. She had an apartment in Kolonaki, where she hosted Sunday lunches for friends in the archaeological community. She also was a spark plug, prone to telling it like she saw it, with little patience for ridonkulous-ness. But she was nevertheless stalwart, and would even get you out of Greek jail if you happened to get arrested for trying to swim across channels patrolled by the Greek army...apparently. And she was loyal to the end - her fiancee died when she was still young, but she never remarried and, although she'd lived her whole life abroad, it was her final wish to be buried back in America at his side.

She died in 1994, at the age of 93, after being a member of the American School community for almost 70 years. Like many past members, her things are still part of the School's floating material culture. It's not just stuff like her billion ancient amphorae down in the Agora Museum, but other things, like that table on which she hosted so many Sunday dinners, now in another ASCSA apartment. And then there's Murder on the Orient Express, which I've finally read, thanks to some connection that Virginia Grace had with ancient Corinth's dighouse. Books seem to be an especially common way for past archaeologists to connect with the younger generation in these here parts. Whether it's the enormous book collection of Ida Hill and Elizabeth Blegen, or Doreen Spitzer's book of poems, or Virginia Grace's archaeological contemporary, Agatha Christie, I highly suggest picking up a book next time you hang at the School - you never know who you're gonna meet.

Interview with Pierre MacKay: Part 2

Last week I posted Part 1 of an interview with Pierre MacKay, Regular Member in 1959-60. Here's Part 2 (of 4):

The Regular Year is usually divided into the Fall, Winter and Spring quarters. What did you do after the Winter quarter, when Members tend to have more free time? Everybody was expected to either do an excavation or an independent project, which would be written up before you left the school in June or July. And I don’t know who did what – most of the people I knew went to Corinth and I chose a journey into western Macedonia to look for traces of medieval military life. Absolute idiot idea, but at least novel. I have to admit that it was partially because I was still absolutely overwhelmed by the reputation of Kevin Andrews and I was doing the nearest thing to what Kevin had done that you could. That meant going to the other end of Greece where the Civil War was most recent and where nobody [archaeologists] had been. Western Macedonia was not one of your popular places. Well, it was also under military control so I had to wait around for military permission and I had almost got to the point by late April-early May when I was thinking, ‘I don’t know what I am going to do but I’m not going to do that,’ when army orders came through saying that I, so-and-so by name, would report to unit so-and-so of the Greek army on such-and-such a day at Florina. It was a matter of stuffing my things into a knapsack – it turned out to be 65 pounds of knapsack - putting on my combat boots and heading for Florina. I appeared there and the commandant of the post looked at the orders and looked at me and he looked at his subordinates and said, “what am I to make of this?” So it was arranged according to the orders that had been cut; they said very firmly that wherever I was, I would have to find the nearest large village and report to the proedros [boss man]. I had a stack of police records THAT high by the time I was finished. And I would go in and the proedros would find me a place to stay or put me up in his house. On one occasion I stayed in the jail because it was absolutely empty and it was the only clean bed in the village.



That most have been very difficult because you did it alone. Completely alone. I really spoke very good Greek by the end of that. When you’ve been thrown on your own resources as thoroughly as that…it’s one of the loneliest experiences, to fall back on a five-year olds vocabulary and to be able to speak nothing else. After three weeks I got back to Florina and I just stored most of my stuff in the 5th class hotel I was staying in and took the bus back. By the time I got to Larissa [train station in Thessaly], I couldn’t speak a word of Greek – Greek had just faded from my mind. The bus was of course delayed, the buses were always delayed. I got back late, late, late to Athens and I came up here to the School feeling JUST absolutely desperate and got into the area surrounded by the Loring Annex, sat on the steps by the porch, and a late night wanderer came in intending to go to bed. I grabbed him like the Ancient Mariner and talked English to him for about an hour and a half. I’ve often wondered who that was.

You didn’t know him? I don’t know who it was. Then I finally let him go to bed and all my Greek had come back. That’s all it took! So I went down and stayed in a pandoxeion [hostel] in Plaka, 8 beds in a huge room, and was able to start out again fairly soon. The second tour, the five or six weeks following that first run, that was wonderful stuff, just wonderful.

Afterwards did you write it up? I wrote a paper. I’m not hugely proud of it now. It’s up there [in the library] on file. What kind of Medieval stuff did you find? Practically nothing Medieval. I did find the largest, ugliest official Roman border inscription in the whole of western Macedonia, which now has pride of place in the Florina museum. Wow. So you found the inscription, went back to the museum to tell them, and they went to get it? That’s about it. And if you did that sort of thing nowadays, you’d be jailed for it. I committed illegal excavations. Oh, so it wasn’t just laying around on the surface? It was serving as the doorstep of the right-hand chapel of an utterly ruined church, halfway up a hill in western Macedonia. So I levered it out again and after I’d read enough of it, I thought, “hey, this is very interesting!” So very dutifully I made a squeeze of it, but it was cold and breezy up there and the squeeze wouldn’t dry, so I pulled the stone a little further away and made a fire and dried the squeeze in front of the fire. And then I went down the hill to the cafeneion [men’s coffee shop] and said I found something up there at that ruined Chapel So-and-so, which I think might be of interest. And so next day we went up and collected it. I was glad to see, many years later, that there it stands in the Florina museum. Ugliest letter forms I think I’ve seen in my life.

How did traveling around Macedonia affect your dissertation? It gave me an abiding interest in Macedonia. My dissertation had nothing to do with where I traveled, except that I had some sense of how much opener and wider-spaced Macedonia was. If you think in terms of lower Greece, you really miss it – especially after western Macedonia where there’s not much limestone. It’s just a different landscape.

Once you were done with your dissertation, what did you do after you graduated? Managed to talk the Archaeological Institute of America into giving me an Olivia James traveling fellowship on which I traveled. Oh, no, first I got the American Center [fellowship] in Egypt to do Byzantine roads in Cairo. Again, I, in Egypt – a lunatic! [Byzantine roads in Cairo] -the sort of thing that if you’d lived 50 years in Egypt you could probably hallucinate yourself into thinking you had traces of something to work with. But there I was in Cairo and I learned much better Arabic and did the Arabic sources for one of the American-Egyptian excavation projects.

Did your interest in topography develop before you came overseas because of your advisor Pritchett? I must have had it already or I would not have taken to Pritchett as completely as I did. Maps and topography was just IT. Were you able to traipse around the countryside with him? A couple of occasions I got to traipse around the countryside with him, it was an absolutely exhausting experience. This man at age 60 could go up a hill effortlessly, just moving his legs smoothly, and you’d come up behind him, eyes starting from your head. It was just astonishing! And he really did so much believe in getting on to what looked like the site and looking around and seeing, “can you make any sense of the landscape given the events that are recorded about it?” Did you always carry your Pausanias and Herodotus on these escapades? Gene Vanderpool was the one who’d be certain to do that. We didn’t have reasonable Xerox facilities at the time, so I’m not sure what we carried around.

What was it like coming back to the School as a Whitehead professor? It was very much later and I didn’t expect it to be anything like what I’d known. In fact, I was pleased to see how much it WAS like the School I remembered. There was a long hiatus there when I got more involved with Arabic and Turkish and didn’t really get back to Greece very much, and then it opened up again. That was a real delight. I’d prepared myself for a real change, and of course there was a change, but a lot of the best things were still there.

'Poison ivy,' a #1 single in 1959.

What was America like when you left and when you came back, what major events were occuring? It was coming out of the ‘50s, which were not nearly as torpid as they’re sometimes described. In fact, Theo and I looked at an evaluation of the 50s about 15 years ago and we looked at each other at the end and said, “Well, I guess the 50s really were like that, but we just weren’t living in it. ‘59-‘60? So of course the Kennedy campaign was going on while I was slogging around the fields of Macedonia; it was a very nebulous experience for me. We’re lucky that we have TV so that we could keep up with the news back home. Did you have to rely only on the papers? Yes, through the papers, or the BBC if we really cared that much. I think there was an American armed forces station around there too, though I can’t remember every clinging to it.

This year we had the Obama Campaign, election and the economic crisis – dealing with events at home while overseas is part and parcel of being at the School. Were you here in the 60s when all the crazy events were going on back in the States? No, I left in 1961 and it was a long time before I came back again, except to Macedonia. I was invited to give some papers at the Society of Macedonian Studies in Thessalonika. That’s when I got to do a walking tour from Thessalonika to the Turkish border. That was wonderful. This latest trip when we went to the same area [in November], I kept thinking, ‘How on earth did I do that?” I would take local buses to a certain area, walk out, study it, come back, and wait for the local bus back in.

Can you tell me more about Vanderpool as THE professor at sites? What he would give was not quite a lecture but marvelously entertaining. He used to say regularly that your purpose here is to study Greece – ALL of it. And so those few of us who did move out of the classical world got a deal of help from him. Vanderpool was beyond description. Very thin, gaunt, energetic…a splendid man.

Was there much interaction between the ASCSA and the other foreign Schools? Colin Edmonson and a friend in the French school tried to form a society of secretaries of the foreign schools and a sledgehammer landed on their heads – it was an organization of foreigners, unpermitted by Greek law. So in fact there was very little opportunity, even with the British School [across the street]. I think there’s more exchange with the British School now then there was then.

Were there public lectures at the School as there are now? Oh, not nearly as many. It was so inconvenient setting them up because [Loring Hall] was the only place they could be held. It meant a great deal of carting chairs around and completely messing up the dining hall, which then had to be straightened up afterwards. Cotsen Hall has made a profound difference in that.
What about the School traditions that we have now, like tea hour and ouzo hour? Tea and ouzo hour were both there. Dinner was still at 8 o’clock. Was most of the furniture the same? Yes, an awful lot of it was. It may feel that way and it really was. I think that orange thing with all the broken springs goes all the way back to 1959.

Lucy Shoe Merritt said that when she came they had butlers. Any butlers in your time? Oh no, that would have been pre-World War II. Everything went downhill very fast after the second world war. How was the food? It was changeable. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. I think the after lecture cocktail parties were great. There were crisp, spicy meatballs to die for. I used to fill up on them.

Do you have any favorite stories from your time in Athens or out on the road? In Loring Hall, not much. As a student here, one was not around that much of the time. I wasn’t going in the same direction as most of the other people, which did some funny things to the kind of conversations we would have; it was the time that Mabel Lang said no three of us were ever having the same conversation with each other. The Macedonian trip? I have so many extraordinary memories of that. One wonderful period of about three days…there’s the big Lake Prespa that sits over the join of the three borders of Albania, Yugoslavia and Greece – and then below it there’s a little tadpole shaped lake called Little Prespa which is divided from big Lake Prespa by a sand spit.

Lake Prespa, Macedonia.

At the west end of the sand spit, where it leads into a tiny, little, isolated part of Greece, there was a military encampment, a part of the military control zone. And so after I left Aghios Germanos, I went over to the military encampment to decide if I was going to infiltrate that little isolated area – I did not in fact decide to do that because there would have been no place to stay up there . I wasn’t supposed to take a camera in [to the military zone], but everyone had a camera, you just didn’t advertise it all that much. The soldiers all insisted that I take their pictures, which I did. I used to do my wandering around in the day and when I came back to barracks the conscripts would at nightfall turn their radios to an open channel, where all the border detachments all the way across the north border of Greece fed into the same channel. The [detachments] would sing to each other. They were still very much singing their local traditional songs. The Thracian would wail these long lugubrious wails, the one from Epiros would do very martial sounding stuff. It was wonderful. Did you learn any of the songs? No, they were too much based in the local culture that each of them had come from that were usually totally unknown to anyone outside that province of Greece.

And then there was the time I got my feet washed. At the other end of the spit, at the town that was taken over by Pontic Greeks in the population exchange, there was a magnificent family of successful Pontic Greeks and [head of the family] was proedros, of course. He decided to take me in and we sat out in the plateia for a while – I had the fascination of watching a mosquito go across his forehead, back and forth, back and forth, trying to find a place where the skin wasn’t too tough to get in, and just giving up at the end! We had a discussion about where I lived and I said I couldn’t describe the house because my parents had moved. “Oh,” he said, “they’ve gone to a bigger house.” “Well. actually no,” I said, “they’ve gone to a smaller house because that’s what they wanted.” His face went blank and then lit up, “Oh, closer to the plateia, eh?”… “Yes, yes, that’s it.” And then we went back to his house and the next thing I knew I was being ushered into the back room where his 18-20 year-old daughter was to wash my feet, the feet of the weary traveler. That was quite an experience, because I tend to be kind of tickle-ish and the one thing I was NOT going to do was laugh at this girl who was performing a centuries old ritual. So we got through that and I got through the suspicion with which I was regarded by the young men who felt they were eligible and didn’t want this prize taken away from them. When I left, I left on the bus with one of them and he explained to me that he was in pursuit of the very lady, but he didn’t think he had much of a chance because “O pateros tis einei malista pasas” – “her father is a real pasha.”

Happy Anniversary to the ASCSA Regular Member Class of 1959!

It was the year that the Twilight Series debuted on TV and Barbie’s face was first revealed to the public. Eisenhower was president. Alaska and Hawaii became the 49th and 50th States of the Union. Two monkeys went into space, managing safely to return to Earth. It was in July that Charles Ovnand and Dale Buis were the first Americans to be killed in the Vietnam ‘Conflict.’ The Dalai Lama fled Tibet on the same day that Busch Gardens opened its doors in Florida. On February 3rd, Buddy Holly died.

It was 1959. In the autumn of that year, a group of graduate students from all over the United States converged in Athens, Greece, arriving by plane and by boat. They came together in the suburb of Kolonaki, looking not much different than it does today (but without quite as much glamour). They met at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, an institution in the midst of a financial crisis, filled with an extraordinary number of driven individuals, and nevertheless possessed of a sense of immortality and tradition. Institutionally and personally the memories of World War II were strong; many of the members in 1959 had acted as Allied Intelligence officers because of their knowledge of the Greek countryside. There was more than one person at the School who could estimate troop numbers and lay explosives under bridges, or conversely, had spent time in Nazi concentration camps. Greece itself was still recovering from the shock of the Civil War, with military rule still clamping down whole regions of the country.

The students who arrived that autumn were the 1959-60 Regular Year Members. General consensus reveals that no year’s students are the same, some are less than stellar, less than pleasant, or the opposite entirely. The group’s measure seems to be determined by the luck of the draw. But no one denies that the ’59-’60 Members were anything less than extraordinary. It seems that altogether that year produced a very special batch of Regular Members, including none other than Ron Stroud, T. Leslie Shear, Jr. and his wife Ione Mylonas (as in daughter of George), William and Sandra Wyatt, Patricia Lawrence, Theodora Stillwell (later MacKay), Pierre MacKay, etc.

This year it is the 50th anniversary of that Regular Year, so I have decided to interview Pierre MacKay and Ron Stroud to find out what that year was like. I’ll be posting excerpts of Pierre’s interview over the next week or so, as I transcribe them. So stay tuned for a little ASCSA history.

Things I see a lot of

The view from the back of the bus. Somehow I've managed to hold on to the same seat I've had the entire year.

This picture is a double whammy. First there's the map stop, with all of us standing around a map of the area, compass properly positioned, learning the lay of the land. Then there is the passing-out-of-the-handouts. If there is a handout for every site we visit, then how many times this year have I watched the handouts go round?

The climbing of a hill/acropolis/mountain. Notice that everyone else is somehow ahead of me.

Usually when people post pictures of their trips, they upload the ones of beautiful landscapes, quirky images, or smiling people. Far too often, the most ubiquitous images are left out, especially the bus. The tour bus is one of the most common things to see in Greece, and for us, it is pretty much the structural core of our day. I would go as far as saying it is the center of our world.

BSA Carnival

So last night was the annual Carnival party at the British School at Athens. The BSA and us go way back, to the 1880s in fact. The American School was founded in 1881 and the BSA in 1886. When we moved to our new digs here in Kolonaki a while back, the ASCSA and the BSA decided to be neighbors. In fact, when it came time to buy the land for Loring Hall, we split the cost (and the land) with the Brits. Of course, when we got hot water in 1930, they were just getting electricity - booyah!

Nowadays, we're virtually on the same land, sharing the gardens and the tennis courts. When I look out my window, I look directly at the British School. There's a long tradition of people strolling back and forth across the street from the BSA to ASCSA, whether for tea, ouzo, lectures, or other social/work occasions (Piet de Jong being a prime example). We also have access to each other's library (even sharing the same library catalogue), which is really handy, given that I'm always looking for books that only the BSA library has. For a while I found their library terrifying, since I always got lost in it, but now that I have (finally!) figured out where the little library maps are, I feel like I'm straight out of London.

I don't know when the tradition began, but at some point in time we started the alternating party thing - we do Halloween, they do Carnival. Last night was the BSA's much anticipated party, which had the theme of 'Down Under.' I didn't hang around too long, since I had Harry Potter to read and went home a little after midnight. Apparently the festivities lasted well into the nighttime, and there were several surly looking people shuffling around Loring at noon today, having just gotten out of bed.

So thanks to the British School for throwing a great party (with great decorations)! Here's how a few of us Americans participated in the theme:

Fosters - Australian for Beer, Boxing Kangaroo, and Dreya with some boingy flowerythings.

Crikey and Criminal.

Dingo a la Elaine from Seinfeld.

Any guesses?

ASCSA Art 1: Dinner Table Art in Loring by Piet de Jong

It is a generally held belief that art is used by people and groups to define themselves. After all, what you’ve got hanging on your walls says a lot about you. From the wall-paintings of the Romans to the posters plastered on freshman dorm-room walls, art is often meant to convey something about its owner, to ooze class, taste, hippness or to be cutting edge. So what, I wondered, does the art of the American School say?

Today begins my new feature on the Art of the American School. I’ll try to post on this topic as regularly as I can, but I won’t pretend that I won’t get side-tracked by other things as well. Especially as we get to the end of the semester and I have four more reports to research (Jane Harrison! Plato’s Academy! Underwater archaeology! Aphrodisias!), I’m running out of time, with a quickness.

Mostly I’ll be addressing the paintings/prints hung on the walls of the Blegen Library and Loring Hall. As I’ve wandered about I have mentally categorized this art into four groups:

1) Portraits – mostly of American School celebrities
2) Landscapes of Greece – showing either idyllic scenes with traditional Greek stuff or

depicting ruins
3) Replicas of ancient works – enlarged versions of ancient artifacts, such as pottery, mosaics, etc.
4) Items of Erudition – stuff that you put on your office wall to show your smartness, like Ye Olde Maps, Renaissance-looking philosophers, engravings of personifications, etc.

I wanted to start with a room that I sit in everyday, Loring Hall’s dining room.

A series of watercolors hang on all four walls, by Piet de Jong.

Piet de Jong, Porch of the Parthenon

By whom, you ask? Piet de Jong, the most influential artist working for the American School (and British School) in the 20th century. Hmmm, that still may not be overly helpful. If any of you have been to Knossos on Crete, then you are well-versed in his work, as he reconstructed the wall-paintings there. And of course, if you have ever studied Mycenaean Greece, then you will have seen his most famous reconstruction of all:

Reconstruction of the megaron at Pylos.

He actually did a whole array of work, from caricatures to site plans, to pottery sketches, to beautiful illustrations of ancient artifacts (see Papadopoulos 2007; Hood 1998, Faces of archaeology in Greece). I’ve been staring at his landscapes while I eat dinner for a while now, but to me, they were rather vague pictures of trees and rocks from the 1920s and that was all. But yesterday we went to the South Slope of the Acropolis, and when I came back and looked at his paintings again, I was in for shock.

You see, while we were walking towards the Odeion of Herodes Atticus, I stopped and looked up at this really amazing image of the Parthenon, one corner of the building just barely peeking out at us. I remarked on it to Margie, and she was impressed by the very blueness of the sky. Thirty minutes later, just about to eat lunch, I realized that Piet de Jong had stood in that very exact spot in the late 1920s and had also recognized what a fantastic picture it might be:

The very tippy edge of the parthenon above the Stoa of Eumenes. Piet de Jong.

I’d looked at that picture, close up, on several occasions, and never realized what it was until I came back from standing in the same place as the artist.

Then there was the matter of the Theatre of Dionysos. Just above the theatre a guy named Thrasyllos built a gigantic monument in the bedrock of the Acropolis. He cut into a cave already present on the slope, added some statues, and threw in some enormous columns. The monument is currently being restored, but it played a big part in our morning escapade. And lo! Piet de Jong painted it not once, but twice, from two different directions.

His watercolors, I admit, are not my favorites; I like a lot of his other work far better and may address some of it here in the future. But it’s nice to know that the paintings on the wall, hung from fishing line, are those of an archaeologist at the School. It’s even better to see the angles and views of the sites we’re seeing every day, there in watercolors. It’s also slightly creepy, for some reason that I haven’t quite figured out. At least I’ll now always have some strange obsessive fascination with that one view of the Parthenon, sticking its head up over the Stoa's broken arches.