Reviews
060
Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of Minoan Myth
Joseph Alexander MacGillivray
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2000) 373 pp., $30
Duncan Mackenzie: A Cautious Canny Highlander & the Palace of Minos at Knossos
Nicoletta Momigliano
(London: University of London, 1999) 231 pp., $80
In the year 1900, two very different personalities converged on the site of ancient Knossos on the island of Crete: the maverick English archaeological enthusiast Arthur Evans and a Scottish field archaeologist and scholar named Duncan Mackenzie, who was to work as Evans’s assistant.
Unlike the flamboyant Evans, Mackenzie has remained largely in the shadows of history—and Nicoletta Momigliano has done a great service in recovering his life from the “meagre scraps” of available information.
Mackenzie had studied in Munich and Berlin before earning a Ph.D. in archaeology at the University of Vienna in 1895. Before arriving at Knossos, the Scotsman with humble beginnings had participated in a preliminary dig in Athens and then essentially directed excavations on the Aegean island of Melos for the British School at Athens from 1895 to 1899. When he joined Evans (a wealthy neophyte, who had never participated in a systematic excavation), Mackenzie was an experienced archaeologist with invaluable knowledge of stratigraphy and Aegean ceramics. Except for a hiatus from 1906 to 1913—when Mackenzie excavated on Sardinia, in the Levant and in the Sudan—he remained Evans’s subordinate until 1929, when he was dismissed for excessive drinking. During the Knossos years, Evans supported Mackenzie financially and drew heavily on his assistant’s expertise, sometimes lifting material almost verbatim from Mackenzie’s writings.
Although Evans’s dependence on Mackenzie’s scientific knowledge was broadly known at the time, it was later forgotten until the 1960s when the British scholar Leonard Palmer began to study Mackenzie’s excavation records, or “Day-books.” Thanks to Palmer, and now to Momigliano, we are also coming to know more about Mackenzie himself, and not all of it laudable. Although he was a good and careful scholar, particularly concerned with excavation methodology, he could be proud, obstinate and indolent. This reserved, troubled highlander—who was more responsible than anyone else for the successes of the early Knossos excavations—spent his last years in an Italian asylum.
Joseph Alexander MacGillivray provides an equally illuminating glimpse of the much-more-celebrated Arthur Evans. As a young man, Evans stood in the shadow of his famous father—the businessman and antiquarian John Evans “the Great.” And yet the son rose to become one of archaeology’s legendary figures, like Heinrich Schliemann before him.
Indeed, there are many fascinating parallels between these two men. Like Schliemann, Evans did not become an archaeologist until his 40s, and he always worked outside the academic establishment despite having inherited a network of elite intellectual connections and several family fortunes. Both men helped discover European Bronze Age civilizations—the Minoans of Crete (Evans) and the Mycenaeans of the Greek mainland (Schliemann). And 061Evans and Schliemann each had money, which allowed them control over their sites and their research and enabled them to produce their own publications. In 1883 Evans visited Heinrich and Sophia Schliemann in Athens and was profoundly impressed by their home—a mansion they called Iliou Melathron (Palace of Ilion), which featured wall panels depicting the Trojan War.
Evans and Schliemann were also shameless self-publicists. Evans always claimed to have discovered Knossos, though at least eight men preceded him to the site—the first being Minos Kalokairinos, a Cretan who excavated at Knossos in 1878 and suspected he had found the Palace of Minos and its labyrinth. Evans did not arrive on Crete until 1894; he then visited Kalokairinos’s home, saw his collection of antiquities, and set out to “discover” Knossos. (Similarly, Schliemann claimed that he had discovered Troy by following clues in the Iliad; what he failed to say was that the Englishman Frank Calvert had showed him the way.)
MacGillivray avoids the sanitized approach of Evans’s half-sister Joan in her 1943 biography Time and Chance. He touches on Evans’s not-always-repressed homosexuality, concluding that Evans “identified with the mythical Minotaur [on account of] … the repressed ‘beastliness’ of his homosexuality.” MacGillivray’s unsparing account describes Evans as a spoiled “rich man’s son,” convinced of his own infallibility and intolerant of dissent. He was autocratic in his treatment of his employees, including Duncan Mackenzie, and quick to turn on the young scholars whom he previously had helped, such as Alan Wace and John Pendlebury. He knowingly incorporated fakes into his theories and obstructed research by refusing to make texts available to scholars. And he lavishly over-restored many artifacts and frescoes, including the famous Palace of Minos.
But Evans also helped reveal to the world the splendid Minoan civilization of the mid-second millennium B.C. For this he reaped every possible honor, joining Austen Henry Layard (the discoverer of Assyrian Nineveh) and Heinrich Schliemann as recipients of the Gold Medal awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects. As McGillivray shows, Evans’s success lay in “his strength of character, his stamina … and, above all, his enormous creative ability.”
In exploring the darker aspects of Evans’s and Mackenzie’s lives, these biographies offer fascinating portraits of two all-too-human archaeological pioneers.
Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of Minoan Myth
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