University of Minnesota Messenia Expedition

In a later reflection on the project, McDonald stated that the inspiration for the Minnesota Messenia Expedition came in 1953.^[1] McDonald had been working on the excavations of the so-called "Palace of Nestor" at Ano Englianos (now known as "Pylos") in Messenia, which had commenced under the joint directorship of the American archaeologist Carl Blegen and Konstantinos Kourouniotis [el], an archaeologist representing the Greek Archaeological Service, in the spring of 1939.^[2][3] The project at Pylos took on a significant role in the decipherment of Linear B, the writing system used in Mycenaean Greece. On April 3, 1939, the excavation's first trench hit an area later known as the Archives Complex, which contained over 600 tablets and fragments.^[2] McDonald, who was supervising the digging, spent several days along with Blegen excavating them by hand, receiving his director's tribute in the excavation write-up for his "circumspection, perseverance and long-suffering in spending so many days on his hands and knees in positions of extreme discomfort."^[4]

Interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, the excavations resumed in 1952.^[3] Kourouniotis had died in 1945, leaving Blegen in sole charge of the excavations: his successor at Archaeological Service, Spyridon Marinatos, focused his efforts primarily on fieldwork in the wider Messenia region.^[5] On May 19, 1953, the British scholar Michael Ventris wrote to Blegen, offering a transcription and translation of the Linear B tablet PY Ta 641 found at Pylos the previous year. Ventris' translation of this tablet served as near-conclusive proof that he had correctly deciphered Linear B, that Linear B encoded a form of Greek. In turn, the translation signalled the possibility of reading the archive of Linear B tablets that Blegen, with McDonald's assistance, had begun to unearth at Pylos.^[6][a] The Pylos tablets revealed a large number of toponyms, and gave hints as to the political organisation of the Mycenaean state centred on Pylos – in particular, its organisation into a "Hither Province" and a "Further Province".^[8]

Blegen, along with Ventris' collaborator John Chadwick and other scholars, saw the need for a greater understanding of the Mycenaean-era sites and settlements of Messenia, in order to match the toponyms listed in the Linear B tablets with the sites to which they related.^[1][9] While some field survey work had been carried out in Messenia during the first half of the 20th century, the number of known sites was comparatively low, and the quality of survey variable across different parts of the region. In 1935, the German archaeologist Georg Karo had been able to list only twenty-two plausibly dated Mycenaean sites,^[10] most of which were in turn derived from the survey conducted by the Swedish Natan Valmin [Wikidata], who had focused his efforts on the Soulima Valley in the north of the region.^[11][12] Other small-scale surveys had taken place in the 1930s and 1940s, principally two investigations by the American Jerome Sperling and the German Ernst Meyer in the north of Messenia, while Blegen had surveyed the region around the Bay of Navarino in early 1939.^[13] However, there was little understanding of how settlements had been distributed between these disconnected areas. Blegen therefore suggested that McDonald make a large-scale survey of Messenia, aiming in particular to identify 'towns' contemporary with the Linear B tablets.^[1]

The British landscape archaeologist John Cherry would later chart another line of inspiration for the UMME in McDonald's interest in the historicity of the Homeric epics,^[14] pointing to McDonald's 1942 article 'Where Did Nestor Live?',^[15] which attempted to use evidence from the Iliad and Odyssey to argue for the site of Ano Englianos as the home of Homer's Nestor. Indeed, McDonald's later collaborator, Richard Hope Simpson, would publish several works in the same methodological vein, including his Ph.D. thesis and his co-authored 1970 volume The Catalogue of the Ships in Homer's Iliad, both of which attempted to find the archaeological analogues of the toponyms used in the so-called "Catalogue of Ships" in the second book of the Iliad,^[16][17] and the publication of the UMME's findings would include the Trojan War as an historical event on its chronological chart.^[18]

In the earliest surveys, the main approach was to identify toponyms in Classical writers, particularly Homer, Strabo and Pausanias,^[19] and to attempt to cross–reference the descriptions of the places given in the ancient sources with the most likely sites for ancient settlement, given the surveyors' interpretation of the modern topography.^[13] McDonald and his collaborators largely looked for material dated to the LH IIIB period (c. 1300 – c. 1180 BCE^[20]), contemporary with the destruction of the palace at Pylos and the Linear B tablets discovered there.^[21] While these expeditions did not formally take place under the UMME name, McDonald and Hope Simpson would later include them under that label in their retrospective assessments of the development of the project.^[21][13]

McDonald's first surveys took place over two weeks in 1953, covering an area 5 to 10 kilometres (3.1 to 6.2 mi) in radius around the site of the Palace of Nestor, accompanied by Charalambos Christophilopoulos, a Messenian who had studied archaeology under Kourouniotis.^[22] He returned for four months in 1955, surveying the coastal region between Kyparissia and Methoni alongside Dionysios Androutsakis, the foreman of Blegen's excavations at Pylos.^[22] Finally, McDonald's receipt of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1958–1959 allowed him to undertake a further series of expeditions with Androutsakis during 1958, from Korone to the Alfeios river.^[22] In other respects, McDonald experienced logistical and financial difficulties, later writing of his frustrations from having "practically no assured funding, and collegial attitudes ranging from cooperation to apathy to obstructionism."^[21] The Greek Archaeological Service issued annual permits for the work, and supervised the project's activities via its ephors for the Western Peloponnese.^[23]

In the spring of 1959, McDonald was joined by Richard Hope Simpson, with whom he developed the surveying methods that would characterise the project over its duration. These included large-scale, extensive survey (what McDonald called "regional exploration"),^[24] initially conducted by using a Land Rover to drive around Messenia and coming across sites by happenstance. Other distinctive methods of the UMME included a focus on identifying sites through surface finds rather than excavating them,^[25] a diachronic focus that collected and reported on evidence of habitation from the Neolithic until the Medieval period,^[21] and the attempt to find explanations for the patterns of site distribution and function observed through survey.^[26] The survey's approach would later be referred to as 'the Hope Simpson method',^[21] a label which McDonald resisted, writing in retrospect that "field strategies were not imposed by one collaborator but were gradually evolved by joint experience and discussion".^[21]

An early indicator of the project's diachronic nature was the presence throughout the 1959 season of Peter Topping, director of the Gennadeion Library in Athens, who was researching the medieval habitation of Messenia.^[18] The later project's interdisciplinary nature was also foreshadowed by the two weeks in which Diomedes Charalambous, a geologist from the University of Athens, took part in the expedition, using an auger to uncover evidence of coastline changes since the Bronze Age.^[22]

McDonald and Hope Simpson undertook a final, short expedition in July 1960, checking the results of their survey with the assistance of Hope Simpson's frequent collaborator John Lazenby [Wikidata], before publishing their initial findings in the American Journal of Archaeology.^[22]

The UMME name was first formally used for the expedition from the 1961 season onwards.^[27][18] McDonald and Hope Simpson were joined on this expedition by three members of the University of Minnesota faculty: Jesse Fant, a civil engineer; Herbert E. Wright, a geologist; and Fred Lukermann, a geographer.^[27] During this period, the project received more regular funding: from the Louis W. and Maude Hill Family Foundation in 1962, 1964 and 1967; from the Bollingen Foundation of New York in 1963; and from various private donors. The expeditions' directors later wrote that all of these "should be credited with a crucial part in the UMME project."^[23]

As the project progressed, its scale and disciplinary range increased, inspired by contemporary projects in the Middle East (particularly the "Prehistoric Project", which surveyed in Iraq, Iran and Turkey, led by Robert Braidwood and Bruce Howe,^[28] and Robert McCormick Adams' Diyala Basin Archaeological Project),^[29] and in the New World (particularly the Teotihuacan Valley Project under William T. Sanders).^[30]McDonald and Hope Simpson expected all of the project's specialists to spend time working and socialising together, to read each other's work, and to become as familiar as possible with each other's area of expertise.^[31] The project secured the assistance of the Royal Hellenic Air Force to create aerial photographs of the region of Messenia, which were then interpreted by Fant (and later William Loy, who joined the project as a geographer and cartographer in 1965,^[18]) to identify potential ancient sites: McDonald and Hope Simpson later estimated that this allowed them to reduce their false positive rate for site identification below 50%, in contrast to over 90% from surface survey alone.^[32] While Hope Simpson and McDonald focused on the surface pottery, Fant surveyed for ancient roads while Wright attempted to reconstruct the paleotopography of the region.^[27] In total, the 1961 season uncovered around 150 probable Mycenaean sites.^[27]

The expedition returned to Messenia between March 25 and July 21, 1963, with the additional participation of the botanist Willem van Zeist; John Lazenby and his brother Stephen, an officer in the Royal Navy; Demetrios Christodoulou of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization; the ceramics specialist Frederick R. Matson; and Eskil Broburg, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota who served as the expedition's photographer.^[33] In 1964, Lukermann carried out investigations into the ancient population distribution, while Matson and Hope Simpson carried out anthropological investigations of contemporary ceramics manufacture on the island of Sifnos.^[34] Hope Simpson led the field survey between 1964 and 1968, also serving as acting director of the project from 1966 to 1968 as a result of McDonald's illness.^[34] He was assisted throughout by Fant; in 1964 by Lazenby;^[34] in 1965 by Roger Howell, a student at the British School at Athens;^[34] in 1967 by McDonald and in 1968 by two graduate students, Nancy Wilkie and Nancy Spencer. Loy, then Luckermann's Ph.D. student,^[35] assisted Hope Simpson with the 1966 field survey.^[35]

The findings of the project, which eventually surveyed around 3,800 square kilometres (1,500 sq mi) of Messenia,^[36] were published in the multidisciplinary volume The Minnesota Messenia Expedition: Reconstructing a Bronze-Age Regional Environment in 1972, edited by McDonald and Rapp.^[37] Reviewing the work in the American Journal of Archaeology, L. Vance Watrous [Wikidata] credited it, along with Blegen's volumes from the Pylos excavations, as having established Messenia as "the best-documented region of prehistoric Greece",^[38] an estimation echoed by the Mycenaean scholar Sterling Dow.^[39] In total, the project found 215 prehistoric sites^[40] and a further 98 inhabited between the Classical and medieval periods.^[41] The project estimated the overall population of Mycenaean Messenia at around 50,000,^[42] a figure McDonald reaffirmed in a 1979 article co-written with Joan Carothers.^[43]

The excavation of Nichoria was conceived as the second phase of the Minnesota expedition,^[44][45] and as an opportunity to test in detail the large-scale hypotheses generated by the survey project.^[46] During the UMME survey, the site was suggested by John Chadwick as a possible location for the settlement known in the Linear B as 𐀵𐀗𐀶𐀀𐀑𐀁 (ti-mi-to-a-ke-e):^[47] the capital of Pylos' 'Further Province' and an important site for the flax industry, as well as the region's coastal defence.^[48]

McDonald first identified the prehistoric site of Nichoria in October 1958,^[49] and conducted test excavations there in 1959 with Nicholas Yalouris, ephor of the Western Peloponnese for the Greek Archaeological Service, to assess the suitability of the site for a full-scale excavation.^[50][b] Excavations, under the permits of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens,^[49] took place between 1969 and 1973, with processing work continuing until 1975, and were published in three volumes between 1978 and 1983.^[51][c]

The site of Nichoria, which included a settlement and associated cemeteries, covered around 50,000 square metres (5.0 ha),^[52] centred around a 500m ridge that has been described as "perhaps the most eroded site ever to be excavated in Greece".^[53] Approximately 4,600 square metres (0.46 ha), or 9.2%, of the site was excavated in total.^[54] After an initial eight-week season in 1969,^[52] focusing on test excavations in seven areas of the site, work in 1970–1971 focused on the areas labelled in 1969 as I–IV, uncovering the remains of a tholos tomb (since known to scholarship as the "UMME" or "MME" tholos)^[55] and evidence of habitation from the Early Helladic period (c. 3100 – c. 2000 BCE)^[20] into the Early Iron Age.^[56]

The excavators found evidence of the abandonment of the site around 750 BCE, and suggested that this may have been a consequence of the defeat of the Messenians by the Spartans in the First Messenian War.^[57]

The excavation of Nichoria was particularly notable for its use of the scientific approaches of the 'New Archaeology' (now generally known as 'processual archaeology') developed in the 1960s.^[53] In the initial 1969 season, the whole site was surveyed by magnetometer, allowing the excavators to estimate the overall size of the ancient settlement at approximately 40,000 square metres (4.0 ha).^[52] The excavators experimented with the use of photogrammetry to produce maps of the site,^[58] and employed both dry sieving and wet sieving, then unusual in classical archaeology,^[59] to process soil samples, allowing the recovery of small fragments of artefacts as well as archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological remains. Attempts were also made to carbon-date some of the remains, which helped to indicate some of the limitations of the use of this technique in the Aegean region.^[d][59]

• William McDonald (1953–1975, field director)
• Richard Hope Simpson (1959–1975, acting field director 1966–1968)
• George Rapp (1966–1975, assistant director^[18])
• Herbert E. Wright (1962–1968)
• Willem van Zeist (1963–1968)
• John Chadwick (assisted with analysis throughout, and in the field briefly in 1968.^[60])
• Cynthia Shelmerdine (excavated at Nichoria 1972–1975)^[61]
• Nancy Wilkie (1968–1975)^[62]
• Sterling Dow (1963)^[1]