Jessica Price

So anyway, the Boston Goddess, Greek Gibson girl, delicate but dapper pre-Danaan dame... sorry I snark She has no provenience. (I learned a thing: provenance is art, provenience is archaeology.) That is, she is without archaeological context. We don't know where she was found.

All those ecstatic articles about her are pretty cagey about where she actually came from. Caskey carefully says, "according to information believed to be reliable, it came from Crete," and everyone else seems to have just run with that.

His successor as curator, Cornelius C. Vermuele III, who sounds like a walking Stiff Upper Lip, claims that "a Greek-speaking Boston lady returning from the American School of Classical Studies in Athens," natch, because she wouldn't have been the sort of lady to VACATION there

anyway, this Greek-speaking but safely Bostonian lady happened to befriend some Cretan immigrants in steerage SO ENLIGHTENED and they showed her the Boston Goddess--in fragments at the time--in a tin and she was like, HUP HUP MY DEAR SWARTHY FOLK YOU MUST TAKE THIS TO THE MFA

and of course that was how it found its way into its proper home in a Boston museum--which of course purchased it for a "fair price"--and not with Greeks traveling in steerage

No one at the museum could name this beneficient Boston lady who guided the figurine there, of course.

so then, another museum employee, Cyrus Aston Rollins Sanborn, who sounds like a walking handlebar moustache, tells the same story except now it's a male archaeologist befriending a lone Greek man in steerage everyone agrees on the "steerage" part tho, so that's something

her fragments were maybe in a cigar box, maybe in a cigarette tin (the museum still has some fragments too small to be used in the restoration in a comely soap box, but I digress

there weren't any ships sailing from Piraeus to Boston during the specified period, but it would be low-brow of us to concern ourself with things like facts about where one of the most important archaeological discoveries about the CRADLE OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION came from

anyway, I promised you I'd bag on Arthur Evans so let's do that: Arthur Evans went to Crete looking or evidence of prehistoric European writing systems because he couldn't stand the fact that Middle Easterners invented our alphabet

But yeah, snark aside, the book literally says "he was hoping to prove early Europeans were no less literate than ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians."

So, Crete was having a bit of a day back around the turn of the last century. -Until 1898, the Ottoman Empire ruled it -Until 1913, it was a protectorate fo the Great Powers -After 1913, it was part of the Hellenic Republic of Greece

But they all agreed on one thing: STOP LOOTING THE PLACE AND CARTING OFF ALL ITS STUFF so unless something was a "duplicate" or insignificant, you had to turn it over to the authorities

But Arthur Evans was a Britisher, by golly, and wasn't going to be told what he could and couldn't do while hunting proof that Europe had always been just as sophisticated as Africa, Asia, and the Middle East

He'd already robbed tombs at Trier, skulls from Dubrovnik, and antiquities from Psychro, Trapeza, and Karphi. He knew that the archaeological importance of objects is deeply linked to their context, but considered rules about unauthorized digging "frivolous"

And he felt bad for collectors, being stymied by all those rules, so, well, those rules would just have to be broken, even if that resulted in a "permanent injury to science."

so in 1908, a Cretan customs agent caught him smuggling stuff he'd looted out of Crete. Rather than give it back, he tossed the package into the harbor. He also got the customs agent fired.

so yeah, gotta run, but when I come back, this fine upstanding gentleman excavates the palace at Knossos

also when I return: misplaced cats, fantasy worldbuilding, and Isadora Duncan being insufferable