Background
His paternal grandfather had come to Pennsylvania from Warttemberg in 1816; his father is listed in city directories as a mattressmaker.
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(The Mycenean empire is traditionally associated with main...)
The Mycenean empire is traditionally associated with mainland Greece and the nearby islands, but remains of their civilization have been found much further afield. This site report presents a Mycenean palace found at Nippur (a city in the heart of ancient Babylon) with a floor-plan and style similar to the palace at Tiryns. The remains at the site suggest a settlement following some sort of expulsion from Mainland Greece (perhaps in the semi-legendary Dorian invasion) and the development of a hybridized Mycenean/ Assyrian culture in the area. This startling find is detailed with excavation reports, photographs, diagrams, and illustrations.
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His paternal grandfather had come to Pennsylvania from Warttemberg in 1816; his father is listed in city directories as a mattressmaker.
Clarence Fisher was educated in the public schools of Philadelphia until 1890 and graduated from Eastburn Academy in 1893.
He attended the University of Pennsylvania, receiving the B. S. degree in architecture in 1897.
Fisher's architectural interests were strongly classical--his graduation thesis had been a plan for a classical building of his own design--and in 1898 he turned to the study of ancient buildings as an archaeological architect for the University of Pennsylvania's Babylonian Expedition to the Sumerian city of Nippur.
When the expedition ended in 1900 he worked for two years at the University Museum in Philadelphia, where its findings had been deposited.
In 1903 the post of research fellow in Babylonian architecture at the University of Pennsylvania was created for him; he resigned it in 1905 to work independently.
The archaeological work in Palestine for which Fisher is best known began in 1909, when he was a leading member of the Harvard University Expedition to Samaria, under the direction of George A. Reisner [Supp. 3].
The first major American investigation in Palestine, the expedition introduced a new era in the disciplines and techniques of archaeological research. In earlier work in Egypt, Reisner had pioneered in the stratigraphic excavating of complete areas of an ancient site.
His work in Egypt was continuing, and much of the responsibility for the digging at Samaria fell to Fisher. In the next thirty years, Fisher developed Reisner's methods as director of or adviser to successive American expeditions.
His insistence upon the most careful kind of surveying and mapping--the drawing of exact architectural plans of every building and wall; recording the location of every object encountered, however small, including each fragment of pottery, so that an excavated level with all its contents could be restored on paper--profoundly affected the development of Palestinian archaeology.
Fisher was to remain in the Near East, mostly in Jerusalem, for the rest of his life, with rare visits to and from his family in America.
From 1914 to 1925 he held an appointment as chief archaeologist and Egyptologist of the University Museum in Philadelphia. He spent the war years working in Egypt for Near East Relief.
The fifteen years after World War I proved to be a golden age for archaeological work in Palestine and the other Near Eastern countries mandated to European governments, which encouraged the study of antiquities.
In 1925 the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago placed Fisher in charge of the excavation of the biblical town of Megiddo, but by 1928 and 1929 he had quit that position to direct the first two seasons of excavation at Beth-shemesh for Elihu Grant of Haverford College. Fisher was appointed professor of archaeology at the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem in 1925.
In the following years he served as adviser or architect to a series of cooperative investigations under the aegis of the school. One of these, the expedition of 1938 to Khirbet Tannur in Transjordan, was the last major work he was to complete. Extensive excavation in Palestine came to an end with the onset of fighting between Arabs and Jews in 1936.
Thereafter Fisher gave his full time to his professorship at the American School.
He was a master of the art of teaching informally. His emphasis upon the importance of pottery, of exact pottery drawings and archaeological plans, was conveyed to all who came under his influence.
For years he worked steadily on his monumental "Corpus of Palestinian Pottery, " but death interrupted its completion; it was never published, and it has since been outmoded by subsequent advances in pottery dating. In his last years Fisher was an active citizen of Jerusalem.
Generous to a fault, quick in his sympathies for the underprivileged, he was the moving spirit, two years before his death, in the founding of the Dar el-Awlad, the Home for Children, in Jerusalem, where homeless basketboys from the Suq (Old City) found refuge, guidance, and instruction.
He himself legally adopted a Christian Arab boy, whose name thenceforth was David Fisher. Clarence S. Fisher died at the age of sixty-four at Government Hospital in Jerusalem.
He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery on Mount Zion, where his gravestone stands close by the grave of another famous archaeologist, Sir Flinders Petrie.
For two years (1921 - 23), under the auspices of the University Museum, he directed the excavation of the citadel of Beth-shan, where he found the first anthropoid slipper-shaped coffin to be discovered in Palestine. On this site Fisher and his successors uncovered a series of Egyptian fortresses from the fourteenth to the twelfth centuries, as well as a sequence of strata going back into the fourth millennium. During the winters of these years Fisher served as architect for excavations in Egypt (at Giza, Girga, Thebes, and Memphis) directed by Reisner. During World War II he was perhaps the most influential and active member of the committee appointed by the British Mandatory Government to look after educational institutions that had been run by German and Italian nationals. Fisher was the moving spirit in the founding of the Dar el-Awlad, Jerusalem, the Home for Children.
(The Mycenean empire is traditionally associated with main...)
He served also as the representative in Palestine of the Lutheran Church of America (his denomination) and as a member of the board of directors of the Jerusalem Y. M. C. A. and of the German (Schneller) Orphanage.
Fisher was a shy, taciturn, high-strung person who did not work well in harness with others, and as a result he never remained throughout all the campaigns of any one excavation.
On November 14, 1907, he married Florie M. Carswell, daughter of a Baptist minister in Philadelphia. They had one son, Clarence Stanley.
