It is impossible to disregard the suspicion that their painters have tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue....
Evelyn Waugh, on seeing the reconstructed frescoes at Knossos, in Labels (1930)
At best, [Evans] has seemed a dupe of his own obsessions with a particular vision of prehistory.... At worst, he has been presented as a rich, upper-class racist, working out his sexual hang-ups and his British imperialist prejudices on the archaeology of Minoan Crete....
Mary Beard, Knossos: Fakes, Facts, and Mystery, New York Review of Books (13 August 2009)
It's easy to criticize in hindsight. Both Schliemann and Evans have been the butt of much disparagement by modern archaeologists, yet their excavations need to be understood in the context of their own times if we are to fully appreciate what both men, their many errors notwithstanding, actually managed to accomplish:
Even as excavations in the Mediterranean proceeded apace, archaeology elsewhere began to put the discipline on firmer, more modern footing. Augustus Pitt Rivers, for example, was much more meticulous than either Schliemann or Evans in the excavations of his own properties at Cranborne Chase in southern England in the 1880s:
Rivers' approach is detailed in the very rare work for which he is best known, Excavations in Cranborne Chase (4 vols. + Index, privately printed, 1887-1898, from whence comes the image above right):
It is hardly necessary to insist upon the large amount of evidence of early times that lies buried in the soil upon nearly every large property, which is constantly being destroyed through the operations of agriculture, and which scientific anthropologists have seldom the opportunity or the means of examining. To render this evidence available for anthropological generalization is well-worth the attention of the owners of property, who may thus render great service to an important branch of science, provided always that it is done properly, for to meddle with and destroy antiquities without recording the results carefully, would be a work as mischievous as the converse of it would be useful....
Rivers' greatest contribution to archaeology, and the basis for his often being hailed as the Father of British Archaeology, was his insistence that all artifacts, not just the beautiful or unique ones, needed to be properly collected and cataloged. This remains a major distinction between modern archaeology and the treasure hunting and antiquarianism which preceeded it.
Similar attention to the smallest details of the most mundane objects also would characterize the excavations of the so-called Father of Egyptian (and Palestinian) Archaeology, Flinders Petrie:
Petrie had cut his archaeological teeth, so to speak, on excavations at Stonehenge when he was only 19 years old. He traveled to Egypt in the 1880s, where he became the first person ever to rigorously analyze and record the ruins of the Giza plateau (so accurate was he that much of the basic data he recorded remains in use to this day). His development of the concept of seriation would prove to be especially influential.
Petrie later made significant finds in many other areas of the Near East, recording the results in nearly one hundred published volumes (and a further 1000 or so published articles):
All of the excavations that we've surveyed over the past couple of posts were taking place at the same time that the last great explorations were taking place in "parts unknown." The explorations of folks like John Lloyd Stephens in Central America and Sven Hendin in Asia would lay the groundwork for major discoveries that would further advance the discipline of archaeology, not least of which would be the discovery of the world's earliest known (datable) printed text....
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