John Linton Myres

Schliemann paid his first visit to Hissarlik in 1868. John Linton Myres was born in the next year, and “at Winchester he read Schliemann’s Troy and was fired by Schliemann’s example”. In 1953 when Michael Ventris and John Chadwick showed how the records of Bronze Age Greece could be read, “he was among the first to congratulate and encourage the young authors”. ¹ It is usually only in the sciences that one man can live through two revolutions, and the rate of progress was possible for the historians of early Greece only because, like the scientists, they have been able to add to their evidence as well as reinterpret it. The work cannot be done in laboratory conditions. The excavator must take (and should publish) what he finds. Knowledge of the country, above and below ground, often takes him to the right place, and, when he knows his site, he can probe for the answers to precise questions. “There was, of course, a time when it seemed better to dig about anywhere than not to dig at all: the unknown was so vast. But those days are over. We begin to know not only what to seek next, but how and where to look for it, efficiently and economically.” ² It is, however, the method of the geologist, not of the physicist, and human remains have a habit of being more unpredictable than natural strata. The laboratory stage, analysis of metal or clay, preservation of perishable material and dating by scientific methods, comes later and is still in its beginning. “There is much scope, in archaeological research, for the special skill of the geologist, the chemist and the physicist.” ¹ Myres offered chemistry, physics and geology as well as classics for his New College scholarship, and he held a classical and a geological studentship simultaneously after his graduation. He came to archaeology well qualified to take part in its transformation from an astrological to an astronomical phase. The process has been described in earlier chapters, but with little suggestion that the author was himself concerned in it. Here an attempt will be made to fill that gap and carry the narrative onward from the date at which his notes stopped.