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Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

Sitting amid a collection of pottery at the Knossos palace are—from left to right—Sir Arthur Evans, the site’s excavator; Duncan Fyfe, an architect with the British School in Athens; and Duncan Mackenzie, Evans’s assistant. According to author James Muhly, though Evans’s work at Knossos was groundbreaking, his five-volume final report, The Palace of Knossos, amounts to a series of superficial (if stylistically impressive) essays; these days, scholars more often turn to the meticulous notebooks of Mackenzie, a well-trained excavator, than to Evans’s somewhat impressionistic work.