Academic family trees

One of the side projects that I’m never going to do anything with, probably, is a social network of Aegean prehistory. One of the first things I became aware of when I got serious about archaeology were academic family trees. In archaeology these connections can be very important, and talked about a lot, but the orientation of the discipline to research in the field, and especially to large field projects, means that doctoral supervisors may not be as important as in disciplines where research primarily takes place in the library.

One of the side benefits of doing this project would be to interpret the data in pretty deterministic ways. I say this with a wink: it would actually be really annoying to most people, and part of me thinks that would be fun (and funny). The reason that I think hard determinism would work as an analytic mode is my own background. I’m in the Blegen doctoral tree: my dissertation supervisor, Tom Palaima, was supervised by Emmett Bennett Jr., who was supervised by Blegen. Blegen didn’t have many students by modern standards, which surprised me a bit, but pre-WW II universities in the US weren’t quite the PhD factories they became; Blegen did, however, supervise Bennett, who went on to a long career at Wisconsin, and Jack Caskey, who supervised a great number of doctoral dissertations at the University of Cincinnati. (Thanks are due here to Jack Davis for helping me understand Blegen’s role as dissertation director at Cincinnati).

Blegen’s approach to the field probably explains something like 99% of my career to date. I work primarily on the Linear B tablets from Pylos, the very tablets that were excavated by Blegen himself (ok, not with his actual hands, but in the “heroic archaeology” sense). I’m working on volume IV of the Palace of Nestor series, inaugurated by Blegen himself. The other major area of my career has been archaeological fieldwork, especially survey, in the Peloponnese, and again, Blegen is central. His prescription for fieldwork in Greek prehistory (parts of it, at least) could almost be a stand-in for the way that I currently think about the field, over 75 years later. Blegen was in fact instrumental in the development of archaeological field (or pedestrian) survey in Greece through his support of the Minnesota Messenia Expedition, or MME, the granddaddy of ’em all. Blegen was a devoted excavator not just of palatial sites, but of towns and villages across the Peloponnese: Korakou, Tsoungiza, Zygouries. These are the types of sites that I think we need to keep excavating, albeit with a much more modern and scientific toolkit than Blegen had at his disposal; but his own scholarly writing makes it clear that he would have made full and enthusiastic use of these methods if they had been available to him.

I remember reading somewhere an argument that scientific research labs should be shuttered and buried when the lead researcher retired – I think there was even an archaeological analogy to burying dead pharaohs under tons of rock – on the grounds that these labs tended to self-perpetuate approaches and results, leading to a bit of a rut. I don’t think that this was the case with Blegen. His view of the field was so expansive that he could set the agenda for multiple generations, way beyond his own lifetime. There have been revolutionary changes to method and theory since Blegen’s retirement, but his fundamental view of the field remains valid.

See what I mean? Hard determinism works!