Reviews

The Discovery of the Greek Bronze Age

J. Lesley Fitton Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1996) 212 pp., $29.95

Reviewed by James D. Muhly

When Heinrich Schliemann excavated Troy and Mycenae in the 1870s, he inaugurated a new era of archaeological study of the ancient Greek world.

Today, the number of Aegean archaeologists continues to grow at an astounding rate. J. Lesley Fitton’s informative and very readable Discovery of the Greek Bronze Age tells the story of this century of discovery—beginning with the “heroic” age of Greek archaeology, when pioneers like Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans were loosening the soils of the Greek past at Troy, Mycenae and Knossos. Fitton describes how Aegean archaeology has slowly illuminated the places, objects and peoples of a world previously shaped by hazy legends and myths.

Fitton, a curator at the British Museum, devotes most of her study to such British luminaries as Evans, John Pendlebury, Alan Wace and Michael Ventris—though she also gives due attention to the American archaeologists who helped develop the field, especially Carl Blegen, the excavator of Troy and Pylos.