Archaeology, sexism, and scandal : the long-suppressed story of one woman's discoveries and the man who stole credit for them

199 Pages·2015·8.66 MB·English

by  Ellingson

This book is dedicated to all of the unsung heroines of early archaeology: the
unacknowledged women graduate students who did not continue in the field and
the wives of archaeologists who toiled on excavations but never saw their names
on the publications they helped produce. This is the story of one such woman
and it must stand as a proxy for all those whose names and contributions to the
field we will never know.
Archaeology, Sexism, and Scandal
The
Long-Suppressed Story of One Woman’s Discoveries and
the Man Who Stole Credit for Them Alan Kaiser
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Robinson, David Moore. Excavations at Olynthus: Part VII: The Terracottas of Olynthus Found in 1931.
Frontispiece. © 1938 The Johns Hopkins Press. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the University of Evansville’s Alumni Research and
Scholarly Activity Fellowship Committee for their support of my research. Also
a number of librarians have been very helpful and generous with their time:
Jennifer Ford, Jeffrey Boyce, and Jessica Leming of the Special Collections and
Archives at the University of Mississippi; James Stimpert of the Ferdinand
Hamburger Archives in the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University; and
Kathryn Bartelt, Margaret Atwater-Singer, and Laura Summers of the University
of Evansville’s Bower Surheinrich Library as well as interns Hilary Wolkan,
Stephanie Marcotte, and Dominique DePriest who have helped to organize and
digitize Mary Ross Ellingson’s papers and photos. I am also indebted to Barbara
Petersen for sharing Ellingson’s correspondence with me as well as stories about
her mother. Rowman and Littlefield editors Andrea O. Kendrick and Leanne
Silverman supported this project from the beginning and put me in touch with
excellent peer reviewers who had much useful advice. Countless others, too
numerous to mention by name, helped me with my research, particularly the
many people at conferences and lectures who told me stories of these
archaeologists and gave me ideas for new directions into which I could take my
work. Finally I must thank my wife, Christine Lovasz-Kaiser, who patiently
combed through archives with me, edited drafts of my work, offered invaluable
suggestions, and who helped make a road trip to Oxford, Mississippi, the
adventure of a lifetime.
Introduction
The Ellingson File—A Photo Album
When people meet me for the first time at a party or other social function and
they find out I am a classical archaeologist the question they always ask is about
my most exciting discovery. I hate that question. The true answer is not what
people expect or want to hear. I have worked on projects at Greek and Roman
sites in Spain, in northwestern Greece, in Israel, and in Italy at Pompeii and
Ostia. One summer I helped search for a lost eighteenth-century synagogue on
the Caribbean Island of Nevis. I have found a few exciting artifacts and a large
number of unexciting ones but they all pale in comparison to a photo album I
found on a shelf outside my office at the University of Evansville. No one wants
to hear that at a party. To tell them the real significance of the find would require
more attention and time than they are willing to give in such a situation. So I
usually tell them some other story that occurred at one of those more exotic
locations and keep the story of the photo album to myself. I only tell that story
when I have a chance to tell it in full.
This most exciting discovery occurred late one November afternoon in 2003
during my office hours. I should have been grading papers but no one seemed to
be around the department offices that afternoon, it was cold and rainy outside,
and the next paper at the top of the stack was by a student whom I knew was not
a good writer. Suddenly the idea of clearing off a shelf in the room adjoining my
office to create a little extra storage space seemed more appealing than
continuing to grade papers. Amid the forgotten office supplies and antique
computer hardware I spotted the photo album under a large envelope stuffed
with yellowing papers resting on a couple of boxes. A letter on top indicated this
material had been gathered by Helen Madeline Mary Ross, later to become Mary
Ross Ellingson after she married. The boxes were heavy and contained a
surprise, a number of plaster casts of ancient Greek terracotta figurines wrapped
in paper towels as well as some ancient pot shards. Most of the casts were of
figurines that dated to the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The pot shards were
actual artifacts, not casts, with black decoration painted on the orange-red fabric
of the clay. Picking up the album, a black-and-white photo of Ellingson fell to
the floor. A lovely young woman with a stylish 1930s bobbed hairdo stood
beside a large stone grave marker (see figure I.1). I recognized the setting
immediately from my own visits to Athens. She stood in the Kerameikos, an
ancient cemetery of the city. Intrigued, I opened to a random page in the middle
of the album. Ellingson appeared in only a couple of these photos but again I
recognized the location. It was a photo of the excavations at Olynthos, or
Olynthus as the Greek name of the site was transliterated in the 1930s when the
photos were taken, but not a photo I had ever seen before (see figure I.2).
Figure I.1. Mary Ross Ellingson in the Kerameikos cemetery, Athens, June 1931. (Photo courtesy
of the University of Evansville Archives)
Figure I.2. Overview of Block A VI at Olynthus looking northeast as it appeared on June 4, 1931;
House A VI 6 is in the foreground, Mary Ross Ellingson is on the left. (Photo courtesy of the
University of Evansville Archives)
The excavations at Olynthus are counted among the great American-led
excavations of the twentieth century. David Robinson of Johns Hopkins
University directed four campaigns at Olynthus between 1928 and 1938.
Archaeology in Greece had been dominated by excavations of public structures
such as temples, theaters, and the buildings around the agora, the central square
of ancient Greek cities. Robinson was one of the first archaeologists to focus his
excavation almost exclusively on houses to better understand domestic life.
These were the days of large-scale excavations, which are simply no longer
financially feasible today. Robinson used a workforce of hundreds of local
laborers each season to uncover enormous portions of the site. While such large-
scale excavation precluded careful supervision by enough properly trained staff,
Robinson still excavated more houses at Olynthus than had or have since been
excavated at any other site in Greece. All modern studies of the ancient Greek
house still begin with the Olynthus excavations. When I was a graduate student I
was required to read one of the fourteen volumes of the Excavations at Olynthus
series for class but had read the rest on my own because I found them so
interesting and useful for my own research on ancient urbanism. The
thoroughness with which Robinson published was also quite remarkable for his
day in that he set out to publish all artifacts he felt were important, not just the
most attractive pieces.1 While modern archaeologists see gaps in his excavation
methods and the materials Robinson chose to publish, he set a new standard for
his day about which materials warranted recording and publication.2 The pace
Robinson set for the publication of these volumes as well as numerous articles in
scholarly journals about the excavation is quite impressive, even dizzying. Some
archaeologists are notorious for the slow rate at which they publish their data;
Robinson was definitely not one of these.
Olynthus was the perfect place to study Greek domestic structures. Located in
northeastern Greece on the Chalcidic peninsula (see figure I.3), citizens of the
city became embroiled in the conflicts between Athens, Sparta, and Macedonia
in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Fearing the people of Olynthus were
plotting against him, Philip II of Macedonia, the one-eyed father of Alexander
the Great, laid siege to the city in 349 BCE. In three speeches still preserved
today, the Olynthiacs, one of the great orators of ancient Greece, Demosthenes,
urged his fellow Athenians to aid the people of Olynthus and to defy Philip.
Despite his warnings, Athens and the other Greek city-states were slow to realize
that the conquest of Olynthus was only one phase in Philip’s larger and
eventually successful plan of mastering all of Greece; they chose to send no
troops to help the beleaguered city. Philip eventually took Olynthus by treachery
in 348 BCE ordering the city to be looted and destroyed and the survivors of the
siege to be sold into slavery. Olynthus was never rebuilt. Although subsequent
generations used the site as a quarry, reducing most of the buildings to their
foundations, a great deal of evidence survived illustrating life in the city before
and during the siege.3 Indeed, Robinson’s team even found six arrowheads and
about a dozen lead sling bullets with Philip’s name on them amid the ruins of the
city.4
Figure I.3. Map of Greece showing the location of places mentioned in the text.
Ellingson had clearly worked on this excavation. The photos in the album
were all carefully pasted to stiff black paper pages and labeled underneath in
neat white letters. Accompanying the album was a stack of letters and news
clippings as well as the boxes of figurine casts and pot shards. She had been a
graduate student at Johns Hopkins University studying classical archaeology and
had excavated with Robinson at Olynthus in 1931. Ellingson had penned the
letters to her family to tell them about her experiences abroad. After Ellingson’s
death in 1993 her daughter donated the album to the University of Evansville
where Ellingson had taught Latin and English courses in her later years.
Someone had placed all this material on the shelf long before the university had
hired me.
The importance of this find slowly dawned on me. Ellingson had participated
in an excavation significant in archaeological history and had written about it in
a candid and often humorous way as it was happening. I knew of no other
behind-the-scenes record like this of the Olynthus excavations. I took the photo
album and letters back to my office and sat down to read. Over the next several
hours I forgot about student papers and the gathering gloom outside. The ghost
of Mary Ross Ellingson came alive, telling me in her own words about her
experiences excavating at Olynthus and showing me what she saw through her
numerous photographs. Her stories were unique to that time and place. I had
known some of the names she mentioned of her fellow excavators only from
their later archaeological publications and their highly respected reputations. In
her letters they became real people to me. Robinson was witty, flirtatious, and
stingy. Gladys Davidson Weinberg, an authority on ancient glass, was a kind,
generous, and supportive friend. George Mylonas, who would go on to direct
excavations at Mycenae, the Bronze Age site of the legendary Agamemnon’s
palace, was stiff and formal, never lapsing from the most proper decorum. J.
Walter Graham, later to become an authority on the Minonan architecture of
Crete, was an energetic supervisor with a large appetite who was always happy
to help Ellingson with her work. Sarah Freeman, who would eventually be a
recognized expert on ancient coins and medals, came to dislike Ellingson, a
feeling that was apparently mutual. Long after they shared their season at
Olynthus, some of her fellow excavators became professors, museum curators,
and respected excavators. One would be wounded aiding the Greek opposition of
the Italian invasion at the beginning of World War II, another is rumored to have
joined the American intelligence effort against the Nazis, many years later two
would be awarded the Archaeological Institute of America’s Gold Medal in
recognition of their contribution to the field, and one would die in a gruesome
murder fifty years after working at Olynthus. Yet here in her letters they all were
young, unknown graduate students excited by their first field experience, playing
bridge, swimming in the clear blue water of the Gulf of Cassandra, and enjoying
a night of dining and dancing. Virtually no candid snapshots or personal written
accounts of the excavations at Olynthus survive making Ellingson’s letters and
photos a rare archive of a significant pre–World War II excavation.
While the details of her stories are unique to Olynthus in 1931, the themes are
universal to all excavations and in them I recognized echoes of my own
experiences in the field. Everyone who has worked on an excavation has felt the
excitement of being the first person in centuries to lift an artifact from the
ground, has made lifelong friendships with fellow excavators, has complained
about the food rations, and has delighted in discovering the modern culture of
the place they are working. In articulate and artful language she captured all
aspects of life in the field in a way few others have.
A few scholars have noted that Robinson made some crucial changes to his
goals and techniques over the years that he excavated at Olynthus. Ellingson
unknowingly captured glimpses of those changes and their consequences in her
letters and photographs proving that 1931 was a critical year in the development
of the project. Robinson is celebrated for being one of the first archaeologists to
focus a research project solely on Greek domestic structures but that was not his