Gournia, Vasiliki, and Other Prehistoric Sites on the Isthmus of Hierapetra, Crete: Excavations of the Wells-Houston-Cramp Expeditions 1901, 1903, 1904. Second Edition
(This volume presents the primary archaeological report ab...)
This volume presents the primary archaeological report about the excavation of the Late Minoan I town of Gournia in eastern Crete, directed by Harriet Boyd Hawes at the beginning of the 20th century. This second edition presents exactly the same information and images as the first edition, but in a smaller, more user friendly format than the original elephantine book. Plans, pottery, and small finds among many other topics on the Bronze Age archaeology of eastern Crete are all included, just as in the first edition.
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Harriet Boyd Hawes was a pioneering American archaeologist, scientist and nurse. She was the discoverer and first director of Gournia, andone of the first archaeological excavations to uncover a Minoan settlement and palace on the Aegean island of Crete.
Background
Harriet Boyd Hawes was born on May 30, 1896 in Boston, Massachussets, United States. She was the only daughter and the youngest of five children of Alexander and Harriet Fay (Wheeler) Boyd. Her paternal grandfather had emigrated from Northern Ireland in 1816 and settled in Boston, where he established the family business of manufacturing harness, trunks, and leather hose for fire engines. This profitable enterprise was carried on by Alexander Boyd, who married into an old New England family. His wife died the year after Harriet's birth.
Education
After graduation from Smith College in 1892, Hawes taught ancient and modern languages as a tutor in North Carolina and at a school in Delaware.
In 1896, wishing to prepare herself for college teaching, she entered the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
In recognition of her achievements, Smith College awarded her the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters in 1910.
Career
Hawes' imagination had been fired by recent archaeological discoveries in Crete. Since there was evidently no opportunity for a female student to take part in the school's excavation program, she decided to use part of her grant as Agnes Hoppin Memorial Fellow to underwrite an excavation of her own, and went to Crete to look for a site. In Crete she was encouraged and helped by the eminent English archaeologists Arthur J. Evans and David G. Hogarth. Fresh from her inspection of Evan's epoch-making excavation of the Palace of Minos at Knossos, Hawes and Jean Patten, a fellow Bostonian who was interested in Cretan plants, set out on muleback to explore the island.
At Kavousi in eastern Crete, they discovered houses and tombs of the early Iron Age. The results of this brief excavation, published the following year in the American Journal of Archaeology, provided Hawes with the material for her master's thesis at Smith (1901). More important, this initial campaign led to the subsequent discovery of Gournia, a Bronze Age town overlooking the Gulf of Mirabello, which remains the only well-preserved urban site of the Minoan age to have been uncovered in three-quarters of a century's work on Crete. There Hawes excavated during the seasons of 1901, 1903, and 1904, under the sponsorship of the American Exploration Society of Philadelphia.
The results of this and other lesser digs on the isthmus of Hierapetra were widely published, most fully in an illustrated folio volume, Gournia, Vasiliki and Other Prehistoric Sites on the Isthmus of Hierapetra, Crete (1908). During the years 1900-1906 Hawes spent part of her time at Smith College, where she taught courses in archaeology, epigraphy, and modern Greek. In 1904 she gained permission from Cretan authorities to bring to the Free Museum of Science and Art in Philadelphia (later the University Museum) a selection of the finds made in her excavations.
Subsequently some of these objects passed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as gifts from the American Exploration Society. As the first woman to have been responsible for the direction of an excavation and for the publication of its results, Hawes won international fame.
With the return to Boston, she resumed teaching, becoming lecturer on ancient art at Wellesley College, a position which she held until 1936. Her courage, her conviction that a rational international society was attainable, and her compassion for human suffering had led her to serve as a volunteer nurse in the Greco-Turkish War in 1897 and in a Florida camp during the Spanish-American War (1898).
During World War I she returned to Greece to establish an emergency field hospital off Corfu to care for soldiers of the retreating Serbian army, and in 1917 she was instrumental in organizing and establishing the Smith College Relief Unit, the first such private group of women to serve in France, in the devastated region of Grecourt. While at Wellesley she was the object of a $100, 000 lawsuit for her part in helping and advising the striking workers of a Cambridge shoe factory.
She was an ardent New Dealer during the 1930s. Mrs. Hawes's involvement with contemporary problems left little time, in later years, for scholarly activities, and the investigations she had begun of major monuments on the Athenian Akropolis, in particular the Erechtheion and the sculptures of the Parthenon, were never completed or published. Her importance as an archaeologist therefore rests on her work in Crete.
After their retirement, Mrs. Hawes and her husband lived in Washington. In 1945, a little more than a year after her husband's death, she died there of peritonitis. She was buried in Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston.
Harriet was reared as a Unitarian but later became a convert to the Episcopal Church.
Politics
Harriet Hawes had a lifelong concern for political and social justice. As an undergraduate at Smith she had been stirred by reports on the Czarist penal colonies in Siberia, and had repeatedly walked from the college to nearby Florence, Massachussets, to talk with English cutlery workers bent on forming a union in order to achieve better working conditions.
Personality
The small number of undergraduates at Wellesley who knew Hawes as a white-haired little lady with keen blue eyes, clad in timeless garments reflecting her lack of interest in the world of fashion, found her a memorable teacher.
Connections
On March 3, 1906, Harriet Boyd married Charles Henry Hawes, an English anthropologist she had met in Crete; their two children were Alexander Boyd and Mary Nesbit. For some years after her marriage she carried on her scholarly activity unofficially, bringing out Gournia and, in collaboration with her husband, Crete, the Forerunner of Greece (1909), a small volume for the general public. Her husband taught for a time at the University of Wisconsin, served as a professor at Dartmouth College (1910-1917), and after the war became assistant director (1919-1924) and then associate director (1924-1934) of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.