Carl William Blegen, Archaeologist

 

 

Carl William Blegen

   Born June 27, 1887, Minnesota         Died August 24, 1971, Athens

 

Row 13 up from the entrance to the Protestant Cemetery

 

American  archaeologist Carl Blegen is perhaps best known in Greece for his discovery and excavation of the Mycenaean palace complex at Pylos on the southwest coast of the Peloponnese, still one of most evocative prehistoric sites in the country.

 

Carl at Pylos in 1961

The beginning of the twentieth century was a wonderful time to be an archaeologist. New sites were being excavated; old sites were being revisited in a more comprehensive and scholarly manner. The odds of finding some wonderful new grave, temple, or artefact were high. There were already enough pottery shards and building foundations excavated to be able to compare sites with one another and begin to accurately date the settlements of those mysterious prehistoric Bronze Age people, the last of whom we now call Mycenaeans.  In this latter endeavour, Carl was one of the pioneers.  He managed to make the story of the prehistoric inhabitants of Greece come alive to a public which previously had focused only on the classical period.

Blegen’s love of Greece, ancient and modern, was a constant thread running through the fabric of his long life. His career began with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, continued under the aegis of the University of Cincinnati, and encompassed two world wars. In that most collaborative of sciences, he had help: fellow archaeologists from Greece and other countries, his own American team, and closer to home, his wife, her lover Ida Thallon, and her husband Bert Hodge Hill. The Athenian Quartet (Carl’s term) chose to live out their lives in Athens at 9 Ploutarchou Street in Athens’ Kolonaki.  Elizabeth, Ida, and Bert were an ‘in house’ dream team that, with their unfailing support, helped propel him to lasting fame.

 

Carl in 1937

 Asked how to pronounce his name, Blegen told The Literary Digest: "Seeking the pagan is Doctor Blegen (blay'gen).  

 

 

His Life:

Carl was born in Minneapolis Minnesota in 1887, one of the six children of Norwegian immigrants.  His father was a professor of Greek, a fact that must have had a strong influence on his life choices. Two years before he entered the University of Minnesota, he lost part of his arm and right hand in a hunting accident – a traumatic loss for a 15 year old.   He entered Yale in 1907 and there earned his Master’s degree in classical archaeology. The years 1910 to 1913 would see him as a student and then a fellow at the American School of Classical studies at Athens where he was given the opportunity to excavate Locris and  Corinth, and time to travel in Europe.

Carl was organized by nature and proved to be a great help to Bert Hodge Hill, the director of the School, when he became the secretary of the ASCSA from 1913 until 1916.  He and Bert, 13 years his senior were a good team. Bert believed in the importance of site stratification and meticulous note taking and Carl was an apt pupil.  It was in 1915 that Carl began his important work at the prehistoric site of Korakou in Corinthia. When the First World War intervened neither he nor Bert left the country. Carl served with the American Red Cross in Macedonia and Bulgaria and was decorated for his service by the Greek state.

Korakou

 

 

Korakou is by  the sea between modern Corinth and the ancient port of Lechaion. Recently the Institute for Aegean History, bought the site (see its outline above) before it was entirely overrun by modern Corinth’s urban sprawl.

The site is small and uninteresting to anyone but an archaeologist. The fact that it had been abandoned before 800 B.C.E. is what made it so important to Carl.  If not exactly a tabula rasa, at least its layers of prehistoric settlements were untouched by later inhabitants. By careful excavation and examining ceramics, Carl and fellow excavator Alan Wace (director of the British School in Athens), were able to comprehend the site - and rough dates began to emerge: Early Helladic 2500-2000,  Middle Helladic I,  2000-1750,  Middle Helladic II 1750-1600, Late Helladic I: 1600-1500, Late Helladic II: 1500 -1400, and Late Helladic III, 1400-1100.  Finally there was a workable chronological history for the Bronze Age people who had colonized Greece. Like every good scientist, Carl saw the dating as providing a road map – not as the final word.  

His meticulous work at Korakou provided Carl with material for his PhD thesis, which became an excellent book in 1921. It can be read online today. (1) His 1921, analysis of Korakou and his careful documentation were a preview of excellence to come.

 

Who Were These People?

No archaeologist with the imagination of someone like Carl would resist speculation about the prehistoric people whose remnants he was uncovering. In his view, they had close ties to mainland Greece.  He saw ancient Greeks as a cultural amalgam – an alloy - if you like - with each successive layer of newcomers, whether by invasion or assimilation, adding to the mix. The Early Helladic culture had ended in fire, been taken over by a ‘more vigorous and powerful group’, again from the north, and by the Late Helladic period their heirs were greatly influenced by the Minoan culture from Crete and willing to modify their own culture and adopt some of the cultural aspects of these sophisticated southerners. 

 Voila: Mycenaeans!   

This theory of vigorous northerners was opposed by Sir Arthur Evans who believed Mycenaeans were dominated by Minoan Crete. Evans called Carl’s theory a “Helladic heresy” and contemptuously referred to Wace and Blegen as “those barbarians”.  Passions run high when people undertake to uncover their own cultural past!

If Carl’s idea of Greek prehistory falls into the category of generally accepted  knowledge today, it is because of these early excavations and his conclusions. His theory was proved by the discovery in 1952 that the Linear B tablets found at Knossos, Pylos and other sites were an early form of the Greek language and that, therefore, his Helladic people were early Greeks.

In 1920 with his PhD under his belt, Carl became the assistant director of ASCSA from 1920 to 1926 with Bert Hill as his director.  During this period he would excavate at Zygouries, Phlius, Hymettos, and Prosymna, the settlement  surrounding the Argive Heraion between Argos and Mycenae.

 

Carl and Bert in 1915

 

Carl, Elizabeth Pierce, and Marriage

Carl had had one disappointment in love in 1912-13 when, as a young man of 23, his suit was rejected by Catherine Munro Shurman, the daughter of the President of Cornell University and a United States Minister to Greece. He fell in love again 10 years later in 1922-3 school year when he met his contemporary Elizabeth “Libbie” Pierce, a fine arts teacher at Vassar, who had enrolled as a student at the ASCSA.

 

Elizabeth

She reciprocated but then ended their engagement because she did not feel she could abandon her long time companion Ida Thallon.

 

Ida and Elizabeth in 1920

Carl’s solution was elegant: for Ida to marry his friend, Bert Hodge Hill, and for Elizabeth to marry him and then the four of them could live together as a quartet.  It was a solution that suited each of them - and society at large – which might speculate, but could enjoy the company and thoughts of the two couples in perfect harmony with the mores of the time. Elizabeth became a tremendous help to Carl, as did Ida and Bert. (2)

 

Prosymna (1925, 1927, and 1928) and a Possible Hero Cult

 

Prosymna

Today Prosymna is a somewhat out of the way spot close to the ruins of the  Argive  Heraion  (7^th to 5^th century BC),  and a great place to contemplate the remnants of a network of ancient roads that once joined the Mycenaean sites in the Argolid together. The chance to excavate and evaluate the prehistoric graves of Prosymna got Carl theorizing once more. There was no Mycenaean palace, but there were cyclopean walls. Carl would excavate 53 Late Helladic tombs on the site. Because he saw from various artifacts that many of these tombs had been visited in geometric times, he came up with the idea that a later ‘hero cult’ must have had been established there.

That the Greeks establishing cities in the historical period were obsessed with their Mycenaean past is evidenced by their drama and the ‘founding’ myths of each new city which all harkened back to that era. So it seemed Carl was speculating on firm ground. 

But you have to be careful. Carla Antoniccio in her much later article  in Hesperia (the ASCSA periodical) suggests that it is more likely that the prehistoric graves were simply being reused in the Geometric age and that the cyclopean walls were, in fact, from the geometric period – something Carl himself had suggested because of the pottery found tucked in the wall’s interstices. But why would the latter people from Argos have built a cyclopean wall?

She wonders if Dorian Argos was a little short of a suitable Homeric past to hang their city myth on, and had built a ‘faux’ cyclopean wall to give their new temple of Hera (Argos’ patron goddess) a suitably ancient back story!  

 

1926 to 1938

Bert’s dismissal from the ASCSA for failing to publish his Corinth results caused the Quartet to reassess and partially sever their connection with the School although not entirely, and certainly not their connection with their many friends both there and in the wider foreign community of Athens.  In fact, Carl stayed on as acting ASCSA Director during the 1926 -1927 year but he then joined the University of Cincinnati as professor of Classical archaeology with the proviso that he could be involved in field work.

 

 

Carl in 1929

It was under their aegis that Carl and his team (3) began detailed excavations in Troy, excavations which would continue until 1938.

 

It was big news in Cinninnati

(The Sunday Enquirer, February 14, 1932)

 

 

Troy

 

 

An aerial view of Troy today

Troy had been tentatively (and correctly) identified by Homer lover Frank Calvert. It was part of his family’s farm.  He began excavating in 1867 before turning it over in 1871 to another believer, Heinrich Schliemann. Schliemann was hunting for Homer’s Troy and to find it cut a huge trench down through the ruins and declared that the level in which he had found a huge treasure cache, was the Troy of legend.

 

Sophia Schliemann wearing part of what Schliemann called   “Priam’s Treasure”

 

Carl’s excavation in 1932 employed a much more refined and systematic approach to the dig, using the most modern methods available at the time, including video records. He established a solid ceramic chronology for the site and linked level V11a  (which had been destroyed by fire) to Homer’s Trojan war (1180 B.C.E.). Schliemann had mistakenly identified a strata more than 1000 years prior to the war.

 

 

No archaeologist ever works alone. Carl was in Illustrious company in this 1939 photo. Left to right: Carl, Konstantinos Kourouniotis, Spiridon Marinatos, Bert Hill, Alan Wace,and Georgo Karo.

 

1939 and Pylos

Messenia is full of Mycenaean sites but no one was sure of the exact location of the Homer’s palace of Nestor at ‘sandy’ Pylos. Schliemann had given it a try – with no luck.   It was Konstantinos Kourouniotis, director of the Athens Archaeological Museum and Member of the Greek Academy who championed the site at Ano Eglianos located about 9 kilometres northeast of Navarino Bay and who obtained the necessary permissions for Carl to begin his excavations in 1939.  In that year, the palace yielded many of those mysterious Linear B tablets baked by accident when the palace was destroyed by fire. These tablets had been ‘written’ sometime at the end of the 12^th century BC.  When Michael Ventris was able to decode it in 1952, it proved to be an early form of the Greek language. 

 

It was a syllabic language like Japanese – good for a list but maybe not for a poem

The rest of the vast Palace complex and the surrounding tombs would have to wait until well after the Second World War during which Carl and Elizabeth and Ida left for the United States.  Carl had joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington D.C, and, upon his return to Greece in 1945-6, the U.S. Department of State in Athens.  He again became director of the ASCSA in 1948-9 and Head of the Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati in 1950, a post he would hold until he retired in 1957.  

 

A site plan of the vast palace

 

The view from the palace

The Pylos palace complex ruled over an area of about 2,000 square kilometres and a population of between 50 and 80 thousand. It was Carl who identified it as Nestor’s palace and he was proven correct when a tablet with Pylos (pu ro) written in Linear B was found. (In Linear B, the l and r sound were the same).

 

 

 

Pu on the bottom left and Ro 4^th on the right

Nestor’s palace and Linear B were big news and Carl kept the public interested by holding weekly open houses on site for visitors and reporters. This site is a must see for any visitor to Greece as is the fabulous Museum at nearby Chora.

 

The Rest

Kudos followed: An honorary degree from Oxford, Cincinnati, the University of Athens, a Gold Medal from the Archaeological Institute of America, and more.

Carl was the last of the Quartet to die. He died On August 24, 1974 and was buried in the Protestant Section of the First cemetery of Athens. Ida had died in 1954, Bert in 1958, and Elizabeth in 1966. Each member of the Quartet is so interesting and contributed so much, that each deserves and will get a separate entry.

 

Afterword

No short text can do a man like Carl Blegen justice. He was, by all accounts, complex, driven, and ambitious to prove his theories correct. How could it be otherwise? 

In a forward to his recent book on Pylos, archaeologist Jack Davis called Carl Blegen ‘old school’. By that he meant that the tools available to an archaeologist today – carbon dating, extensive surface surveys (on foot or by remote sensing devices) and, of course, much more cumulative data allows more accuracy.  On the other hand, Carl lived in an era of archaeological exploration that allowed, invited even, glorious speculation. If some of his theories were based on cultural prejudices (how could they not be?), more of it was inspired by painstaking methodology, sheer doggedness, inspired imaginative leaps, and just plain love of the hunt!   Few archaeologists since have had the same impact on the study of prehistoric Greece as Carl Blegen.

There is a recent  book about Carl Blegen called Carl W Blegen, Personal and Archaeological Narratives edited by Natalia Voegelkoff-Brogan, Jack Davis, and Vasiliki Florou put out by Lockwood Press which is well worth seeking out.

 

His Grave

 

The Map

 

Footnotes

(1) https://archive.org/details/korakouaprehisto00bleg

(2) Natalia Brogan the ASCSA’s  archivist and expert on all things Hill and Blegen tells one interesting story about the marriage.  Elizabeth and Carl married in Lake Placed New York in 1924. Not only did he not invite his family, he did not even inform his mother with whom he was close. He never introduced Elizabeth to his family. It seems odd, particularly because he did share his woes when he had been rejected by Catherine Munro Shurman 10 years earlier. It is suggestive but I am not sure of what. Was it his Lutheran background?

He did attend the wedding of Bert and Ida and wrote:  Bert saying, It certainly is the finest possible solution of the whole problem, best in every way for everybody … and we are going to have a wonderful time together when our Quartet reassembles in Athens.

 (3) Carl’s partners in this endeavour were American archaeologists  Marion Rawson and John Caskey.

Sources

 

The best source for Bert Hodge and the Quartet is the ASCSA itself.  They are very generous with their on line Information. Archaeologist Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan  and her wonderful From the Archivist's Notebook  offers a wealth of information  about the school and its archives. See https://nataliavogeikoff.com From the Archivist's Notebook

 

                                                                                                                                   --https://www.archaeological.org/archaeologists-you-should-know-bert-hodge-hill/ 

https://www.google.gr/books/edition/Histories_of_Peirene/8FX9PfBGqPoC?hl=el&gbpv=1&dq=bert+hill,+archaeologist&pg=PA115&printsec=frontcover

https://www.google.gr/books/edition/Carl_W_Blegen/YwhPDgAAQBAJ?hl=el&gbpv=1&dq=carl+blegen,&printsec=frontcover

https://nataliavogeikoff.com/2015/11/01/the-end-of-the-quartet-the-day-the-music-stopped-at-ploutarchou-9/#more-1771

https://nataliavogeikoff.com/2014/02/14/my-heart-is-beating-february-13-1923/  

https://www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/bios/Hill_Ida%20Thallon.pdf

https://www.google.gr/books/edition/Carl_W_Blegen/OwdPDgAAQBAJ?hl=el&gbpv=1&dq=ida+thallon+marriage+1924&pg=PT143&printsec=frontcover. 

 

https://chpl.org/blogs/post/tbt-carl-blegen/

https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/archives/history-of-the-american-school-1882-1942-chapter-i

https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/archives/history-of-the-american-school-1882-1942-chapter-ii

and

https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/archives/history-of-the-american-school-1882-1942-chapter-iv

 

 

Ida Thallon Hill

 

 

Ida Thallon Hill

Born August 11, 1875, New York                  Died December 14, 1954, Athens

 

 

About ten rows up on the left, up the lane leading from the entrance to the Protestant Cemetery

 

If Ida Thallon had never left her teaching post at Vassar, she would have had a great career. Adept in Greek, Latin, and History, she taught them all until her relationship with fellow teacher Elizabeth ‘Libbie” Pierce brought her permanently to Athens, to marriage at 49, and to a second career focused on archaeology. Ida had spent two years as a Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens from 1901-1903 and it was her happy experience there that prompted her to bring her partner, Elizabeth Pierce, to Greece - so she could experience the School for herself.

If the school’s assistant director Carl Blegen had not fallen in love with Elizabeth, if Elizabeth had not reciprocated, and if school director Bert Hill Hodge had not been willing, Ida may have spent a rather lonely old age in the United States. But, Fate, with a little help from Carl, determined a happier ending. This is a love story with a difference.

 

Her Life

Ida Thallon was born on August 11, 1875, one of the two daughters of John and Grace Thallon.  She attended high school at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn New York, one of the high schools exclusively for girls which had begun to operate in the United States after 1850. 

 

The school Ida attended is still operating.  Today it is coeducational.

During the first part of the 19^th century, the secondary education of males in America was deemed far more important than that of females. The general belief was that primary school was good enough for girls who, after all, were destined to marry, have children, and remain in the home.  Even Emma Willard (1787–1870), a woman who championed high school education for women in the United States saw female secondary education as the best means for women to ‘find their place in society.’ By that she meant the woman as homemaker and mother. She considered the notion of women receiving a college education ‘absurd’. (1)

Things moved along fairly quickly after 1860 when several women’s colleges were founded:  Vassar in 1865, Wellesley and Smith in 1875, Bryn Mawr in 1885, Radcliffe in 1879, and Barnard in 1889. The idea of men and women being educated together would have been altogether too radical a departure from accepted norms.  It was from Vassar that Ida obtained her AB in 1897. While not quite a pioneer, she was fortunate to have ridden the wave of educational opportunities for women in the United States.

 

Ida (left) at Vassar in 1897

Upon graduating, she would still face a society which may have been ready for female nurses, librarians or teachers but not much else. Back then, a woman with scholarly ambitions needed to have supportive parents (which I suspect Ida had) and be so clever that her ambitions could not be denied (which I suspect she was).  

In 1899, Ida set out with fellow Vassar graduate, Lida Shaw King (2) on a European tour and to attend the 1901-2 session of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She attended lectures and met archaeologists,  including the American adventurer/archaeologist  Harriet Boyd. (3)  Ida, became smitten enough with archaeology to want to stay on an extra year.

 

The School in 1902

Although the ASCSA had accepted women from the get go, and accepted its first female student in 1885, Ida soon saw that women were not being treated equally with the male students.  The school was reluctant to allow women to take part in excavations – too rough and tough apparently.  Ida pushed against this prejudice.  She managed to wangle a place for herself and Lida on the team excavating a cave dedicated to Pan near Vari in Attica. They were the first women to excavate in an archaeological site in Greece. (4) 

 

In the cave they found inscription lamps, coins, and 7 marble reliefs of Pan, Hermes and the Nymphs.

 

 

Pan caves with marble votives like the one above were common in ancient Greece.  At Vari, 50 fragments of 7 votives were unearthed and are now in the National Archaeology Museum of Athens

 

Ida was chosen to prepare a paper on these marble reliefs. It was published in The American Journal of Archaeology in 1903. The reliefs were not earth shattering discoveries, but her report was excellent: clear, meticulous, and scholarly and can be read on line today.(5) The School offered Ida and Lida the publication of terra cottas from their prime site at the time: Corinth.

During her two years at the ASCSA Ida visited many archaeological sites and met fellow student Bert Hodge Hill, one of the 16 students in her class. She liked him but never dreamed they would eventually marry. At the same time, she completed her Master’s thesis on Geometric vases.

 

Back to Vassar

An offer to teach Greek at her alma mater, Vassar, took her back to the United States. Ida taught there for two years before enrolling in New York’s Columbia University from which she earned her PhD in 1905 with a dissertation on the dating of the sculptor Damophon in Arkadia’s Lycosoura.

 

 

Damophon’s handiwork

Lycosoura is on Mount Lykaion, one of the most mysterious mountains in the Peloponnese with werewolves, rain making rituals, and theriomorphic figures on the Maiden’s cloak.  (6)

 

From 1906 until 1924, Ida would teach Latin for two years and then history. In 1914 she published her first book, Readings in Greek History. It was very well received.

 

 

In 1916, she published an article arguing that interdisciplinary approaches to history and archaeology would benefit both fields. Here she was very much ahead of her time.  1919 saw her publish an article on Troy, probably never imagining she would ever do any digging there.  She became an associate professor in 1916.

 

 

Ida Meets Elizabeth Pierce

Ida might have continued teaching at Vassar until retirement if a strange chain of events had not brought her back to live permanently in Greece. It all began in 1906 although Ida did not know it at the time.  In that year, 19 year old  Elizabeth “Libbie” Pierce had attended Ida’s freshman course in Latin. Ida who was 31 at the time, became her friend and mentor. Elizabeth would follow in Ida’s footsteps, - an AB from Vassar in 1910, her masters in 1912 , and further studies at Columbia before returning to Vassar in 1915 to an assistant curatorship at the Vassar art gallery and to  teach Art History.

 

Their ‘Boston Marriage’

It was after 1915 that Elizabeth and Ida established the kind of relationship that at the time was called a Boston marriage (7) in which two women who were independent of financial support from a man cohabitated.  In a society where being unmarried was a stigma and an unmarried woman living alone was treated with a certain amount of suspicion, it made sense. These women could pursue their careers in congenial and supportive company.  The very fact that colleges like Vassar were female only would have encouraged such friendships to form.  Trading an interesting and fulfilling career for a wedding ring and the home was not every educated woman’s dream, yet that is exactly what society expected women like Ida to do if they did marry.  

It was sometime after 1915, that Ida and Elizabeth decided to share their lives in this way.  It was a loving relationship; to what degree it was sexual is their own business.  

 

Greece

In 1921 they decided to travel to Greece together.  Ida would renew her acquaintance with the ASCSA and Elizabeth would enrol in the school for the 1922-3 school year.  

 

Ida and Elizabeth in 1920

 

Ida, Elizabeth, Carl, and Bert

The ASCSA was the backdrop for the crisis and the resolution of the drama which unfolded that year. Assistant Director Carl Blegen, then in his mid thirties, fell head over heels in love with Elizabeth. She reciprocated at first and accepted his proposal of marriage. She then withdrew it because she did not want to give up her relationship with Ida. Apparently, Ida had (perhaps reluctantly?) given her blessing. It must have been a very difficult time for Ida. She was well into middle age and the love of her life was about to disappear.

It was Carl who found a solution - if only his friend Bert Hodge Hill, then director of the ASCSA, could be persuaded…

Bert was unmarried and just one year older than Ida; they knew each other; they had shared interests. What if Carl married Elizabeth and Bert married Ida and they all lived together?

 

Carl (left) and Bert (right) both dapper in 1915

In our age of polyamory, many might not blink at such an arrangement, but this was 1924 and social norms had to be observed.  There were details to be worked out. Ida and Elizabeth were to have their time alone and time to travel alone together, as were Bert and Carl.

It was a solution which worked although there may have been one or two rough patches on the way to harmony at 9 Ploutarchou Street in Kolonaki, the house where all four were to live happily together from 1929 until Ida’s death in 1954.

 

9 Ploutarchou Street is today the seat of the J.F. Costopoulos Foundation which promotes Greek Culture and Arts within and outside of Greece .Elizabeth had willed it to the ASCSA.

 

I suspect that their shared interest in archaeology, that most collaborative of sciences, provided some of the ‘glue’ that kept the ‘Athenian Quartet’ (Carl’s term) together.  For the rest of their lives each was in an excellent position to assist the other in their many archaeological endeavours and they all did.  The fact that they called themselves the pro pars (for professional partnership) hints at the role their shared interests in archaeology must have played in their lives.

 

Married Life and Bert’s Dismissal from the ASCSA

Ida’s marriage did not result in her giving up her career. Instead, it enhanced it.

As the wife of the director of the ASCSA, she was now surrounded by archaeologists. By helping Bert in Corinth and Carl in his excavations at   Prosymna in 1925, she could add field archaeology to her other talents.

 

 

Prosymna, in the Argolid, began in the Neolithic period existed well into the Mycenean. Carl excated 53 Mycenean chamber tombs there. The site is  famous for its Sanctuary of Hera, Argos’ most important goddess.

 

Ida resumed the task of publishing the terracottas of Corinth which she and Lida had begun so many years before. Elizabeth became her helper in the renewed project because Lida had died in 1922.  

 

 

It was published in 1929

 

Ida was less successful in her effort to help Bert complete his reports on his Corinth finds. Even she could not bring poor Bert to the finish line and, to the shock and dismay of the ‘Quartet’, Bert’s contract as director of the ASCSA was not renewed in 1926.   Ida was furious; she believed that the ASCSA’s management committee were overlooking many of Bert’s other sterling qualities, which indeed they were.

 

 

Ida ‘at home’

Still, life went on and Ida herself participated in digs at Prosymna in 1927-8, at Troy (for Carl) from 1932-8 and finally (for Carl) at Pylos. Bert would conduct excavations in Cyprus for the University of Pennsylvania in 1932 and from 1932 to 38.  Ida helped there as well.

She and Elizabeth did have their time together when needed. In 1937 and 8 they took two extensive tours of the Balkans together with their Greek driver, visiting Northern Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Croatia at one go, quite an adventure, especially for Ida who was well into her sixties.

During World War II, Ida, Carl and Elizabeth went to the United States while Bert remained in Greece. Ida worked on a book during that period which she never finished but, after the war, she did complete her excellent The Ancient City of Athens which you can read on line. It reminds me of Pausanias updated: full of the latest archaeological discoveries and rather less speculation on arcane rites.

 

Published in 1954

 

Ida died on a return voyage to Greece, after a visit to the United States. Elizabeth was at her side. She was 74. That same year she had assisted Carl at Pylos.  What a life!

 

The Grave

 

Ida and Bert are just a few rows west of Elizabeth and Carl

 

 The Map

 

Footnotes

 (1)  In 1840, Catherine Elizabeth Brewer Benson became the first woman in America to receive a tertiary degree. It was from Wesleyan, the first college in the world chartered to grant degrees to women.

 (2)  Lida Shaw King, another Vassar graduate, was 7 years older than Ida and attended the ASCSA  as the Agnes Hoppin Memorial Fellow. This was a fellowship established in 1898 intended to “lift the restrictions on women in the study of archaeology".  She would later become the dean of Pembroke college, the female co-ordinate of Brown University.

(3) Harriet Boyd, a Smith College graduate in classics, was an amazing woman who, because of the lack of opportunity to excavate in Greece, went to Crete, then under Ottoman control, to try her luck. She began at Kavousi and years later discovered the Minoan site of Gourna.

(4)   Harriet Boyd excavated before Ida but Crete was not yet part of Greece.

(5)  See https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/496691.pdf) .  

(6)  I once sat on the tiered seating arrangement outside of the Lykosoura temple’s unusual side door - waiting for “something”.  Nothing happened. But the site is so evocative, I may try again.

(7)    The term “Boston marriage” resulted from a relationship described by Henry James in The Bostonians. The term ‘Wellesleyan marriage’ was sometimes used because so many female graduates of that college entered into the arrangement.

 

Sources

The best source for Bert Hodge and the Quartet is the ASCSA itself.  They are very generous with their on line Information. Archaeologist Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan  and her wonderful From the Archivist's Notebook  offers a wealth of information  about the school, its archives, and the Quartet.  See https://nataliavogeikoff.com From the Archivist's Notebook

 

https://nataliavogeikoff.com/2018/09/02/touring-the-balkans-with-the-ladies-of-ploutarchou-9/

https://www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/bios/Hill_Ida%20Thallon.pdf