Volume 48, Number 17 · November 1, 2001
The Labyrinth of Arthur Evans
By Richard Jenkyns
Motya: Unearthing a Lost Civilization
by Gaia Servadio
London: Gollancz, 260 pp., £16.99
Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth
by Joseph Alexander MacGillivray
Hill and Wang, 373 pp., $30.00
Rich archaeologists are different: they have more opportunity. That is true at least of archaeology's heroic age, in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Heinrich Schliemann, the excavator of Troy and Mycenae and the father of modern archaeology, used the vast wealth that he had accumulated in the first half of his life to fund his activities (which included paying off the Turkish authorities for finds that he had illicitly removed). Gaia Servadio's Motya and Joseph Alexander MacGillivray's Minotaur are very different kinds of book, but they have this in common, that they are both concerned at least in part with Englishmen who were able to conduct important excavations because they had money. And both, as it happens, were uncovering the remains of ancient civilizations which lay on the fringes of the classical Greco-Roman world.
Review, 4294 words
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