Richard Hope Simpson | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1930-05-12)12 May 1930 United Kingdom |
| Died | 11 November 2016(2016-11-11) (aged 86) |
| Occupation | Academic |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | St John's College, Oxford (M.A.),University of London (PhD) |
| Thesis | The topography of Mycenaean Greece in relation to the Achaean section of the Homeric Catalogue of the Ships |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Classical archaeology |
| Sub-discipline | Archaeological survey,Mycenaean archaeology |
| Institutions | University of Birmingham,University of Toronto,Queen's University at Kingston |
Richard "Dick" Hope Simpson (1930–2016) was a Britishclassical archaeologist, known for his work inarchaeological survey and the study ofMycenaean Greece. For most of his career, he taught atQueen's University inKingston, Ontario.
A leading figure in Greek field survey throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Hope Simpson played a major role in theUniversity of Minnesota Messenia Expedition and in the production of several of the keygazetteers of Mycenaean civilisation in Greece. His work was significant in allowing an understanding of Mycenaean states, particularly inMessenia, beyond the relatively small number of large, well-known and excavated sites. In the 1960s, his projects pioneered new methods of extensive survey, including the use ofremote sensing viaaerial photography.
Hope Simpson believed in the essentialhistoricity of the Homeric epics and produced several works, including his doctoral thesis, attempting to locate thetoponyms of theIliad with the archaeological sites known from Mycenaean Greece. The archaeologistSinclair Hood described him as "an apostle ofCommon Sense".[1]
Hope Simpson was born on 12 May 1930, the middle of three brothers.[2] His father, John Whitwell Hope Simpson,[3] was aGP.[4] He was a distant relative ofSir John Hope Simpson, the civil servant, MP and diplomat.[5]
He studiedliterae humaniores (Classics) atSt John's College in theUniversity of Oxford,[6] matriculating in 1950. After graduating, he remained at Oxford for the 1954–1955 academic year to pursue a Diploma in Classical Archaeology. His tutor wasDorothea Gray, to whom he later credited his interest in Greek prehistory, and with whom he would undertake some of his early survey work in Greece.[7]
While at Oxford, he attended theBritish School at Athens's undergraduate summer course, where he met then-directorSinclair Hood. He continued to theUniversity of London to study for his PhD From 1956 to 1958, he returned to the British School at Athens on a school studentship.[8] He submitted his thesis,The Topography of Mycenaean Greece in Relation to the Achaean Section of the Homeric Catalogue of the Ships, in November 1962.[8]
In 1959, Hope Simpson was awarded the first[8]Michael Ventris Memorial Award for Mycenaean Studies, given by theInstitute of Classical Studies to promising young scholars in the field of Mycenaean orMinoan studies.[9] He was most known and prolific in the field ofarchaeological survey, and his many contributions to large-scale landscape surveys of Mycenaean sites. In the spring of 1957, while still a doctoral student, he had completed a survey of theSpercheios Valley inPhthiotis incentral Greece, alongside his frequent collaborator John Lazenby.[8]
Between 1956 and 1958, he made an extensive survey ofLaconia, including the islands ofKythera andAntikythera, alongsideHelen Waterhouse and at the encouragement ofAlan Wace.[10] Like most of his future survey work, the expedition consisted largely of the collection and cataloguing of surface finds, with the view to identifying and mapping sites of Mycenaean habitation. The Laconia survey significantly increased the number of known Mycenaean sites in the region,[10] and remained widely cited into the 21st century.[11] In the spring of 1956–7, he spent seven weeks surveying in south-easternMessenia, with the assistance ofDavid French, and later published his work as "Identifying a Mycenaean State", in which he linked his discoveries with the seven cities promised toAchilles byAgamemnon in theIliad.[12][13] His belief in the essential correspondence between the place-names of theHomeric poems and the geography of the Mycenaean period led him to write,[14] with John Lazenby,TheCatalogue of Ships in Homer's Iliad, which attempted to match the places named in theIliad with those known from archaeological survey.[15] Contemporary reviews, however, questioned the value of the Catalogue as an historical document, pointing to its essentially poetic nature as well as its composition over many centuries,[16] and most modern scholars consider the attempt to find archaeological evidence for the historicity of the Homeric poems to be fundamentally misguided.[17]
Between 1960 and 1970, Hope Simpson and Lazenby worked together on a further survey of theDodecanese.[7]
In 1958, he joinedWilliam McDonald in what would become theUniversity of Minnesota Messenia Expedition, surveying Mycenaean sites inMessenia. The approach of this survey, which came to be known as the "Hope Simpson method" (though McDonald always claimed it as a joint decision, even to later critics),[18] typified his later work: broad, extensive survey based on surface finds; a focus on site function as well as distribution; and the recording of information relevant to as many periods of history as possible.[18] By 1962, the expedition was formally constituted with a team of five: in addition to McDonald and Hope Simpson, three of McDonald's colleagues from theUniversity of Minnesota: Jesse Fant,Herbert E. Wright and Fred Lukerman.[19] From 1966 to 1968, owing to McDonald's illness, Hope Simpson served as field director of the project.[20]
The methods of the UMME were innovative in several ways. Firstly, they made extensive use ofaerial photography, provided by theHellenic Air Force during the summers, to identify promising sites for investigation, enabling them to cover far more ground than previous surveys.[21] Secondly, with the assistance ofJohn Chadwick of theUniversity of Cambridge, they attempted to match the sites identified in their survey to thetoponyms known from the Linear B archive of the so-called "Palace of Nestor"' atPylos, excavated byCarl Blegen in 1939 but only made legible with Chadwick andMichael Ventris's decipherment of the Linear B script, completed in 1952–1953 and published in 1956.[22] While this approach was later criticised for its propensity to miss smaller sites, particularly those whose location did not conform to expected patterns of settlement,[21] it revealed over 200 habitation sites across an area of 3,500 km2,[22] and has been described as "a prodigious influence on the development of archaeology in Greece", opening the possibility for the first time of the study of Mycenaean geography.[23]
During the UMME season of August 1966, Hope Simpson travelled to the marble quarries at Kypranion in Laconia, recovering samples which he used in collaboration withReynold Higgins and S. E. Ellis to demonstrate that these were the source for the red and green marble used on the façade of theTreasury of Atreus at Mycenae.[24]
Hope Simpson left London in 1960, and worked as a Research Fellow at theUniversity of Birmingham until 1963,[25] when he emigrated to Canada. He taught for a year at theUniversity of Toronto before moving in 1964 toQueen's University, Kingston to take up a professorship in Classics and Archaeology, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1993.[6]
Throughout the succeeding decades, Hope Simpson's main scholarly contribution was in the production ofgazetteers of prehistoric sites throughout Greece. In 1965, he publishedA Gazetteer and Atlas of Mycenaean Sites, cataloguing over 600 sites throughout the Greek mainland and islands, as well as the coast ofAsia Minor.[26] In 1969, at the suggestion ofHector Catling, he began working with Oliver (O. T. P. K.) Dickinson, originally a Sir James Knott fellow atNewcastle University, from 1972 until 1975 a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, on what was published in 1979 as the first volume ofA Gazetteer of Aegean Civilisation in the Bronze Age.[27] He followed this in 1982 withMycenaean Greece, a gazetteer in all but name,[28] incorporating material from centralMacedonia and more sites in Asia Minor. This publication was praised for its thorough coverage and inclusion of maps and plans, including an early effort to address the question of roads and routeways in Mycenaean Greece, which later formed the basis of his 2006 book (with D. K. Hagel),Mycenaean Fortifications, Highways, Dams and Canals. However, the book was criticised for adding few sites to the corpus of his 1979 work,[28] and for failing to incorporate methodological advances in survey techniques since the early 1970s.[29] By 1983, such large-scale gazetteers, making use of extensive survey to catalogue sites in a diachronic manner, could be described as "the familiar Hope Simpson format".[30]
From 1977 to 1979, along with Joseph Shaw, he conducted the survey of theKommos region of southernCrete — a survey which, by the time of the project's eventual publication in 1995, was noted as embodying the "pioneering" methods of the UMME but as suffering from the lack of methods and techniques which had, in the intervening two decades, become standard in Greek field survey.[31] In particular, the relatively unsystematic nature of the collection and interpretation of survey data was judged byJack Davis as leading to "methodological imprecision [which] often detracts from the potential usefulness of the data".[31] Indeed, by 1982, his methods, which had been described as "pioneering" for the 1950s and 1960s,[30] were labelled as "cautious" and "traditional".[28]
From 1985 to 1991,[32] he directed the intensive survey of the island ofPseira, near Crete, uncovering 315 prehistoric sites ranging chronologically from theNeolithic to theByzantine period.[33] From 1986 to 1988, he took part in the excavation of the fortified Mycenaean settlement of Kiapha Thiti inAttica, directed by theCanadian Institute in Greece[34] — a rare example of a fortified non-palatial Mycenaean site, which provided evidence of construction techniques attested nowhere else in the Mycenaean world.[34]
From 1990 to 1995, he served on the advisory board of thePylos Regional Archaeological Project, led by Jack Davis,[35] which aimed to supplement the work done by Hope Simpson and McDonald through the UMME survey with detailed, small-scale intensive study of Messenian sites and landscapes.[21] He retired from Queen's University in 1993: in retirement, he published two further books,Mycenaean Fortification, Highways, Dams and Canals (2006, with Hagel) andMycenaean Messenia and the Kingdom of Pylos (2014).
His final book,Mycenaean Greece and the Homeric Tradition, was published posthumously inopen access in 2018.[36]
In 1958, Hope Simpson married Jennifer Crick.[2] Throughout the 1950s, the couple had surveyed widely, both together and separately, in Greece, generating data which formed much of the foundation for Hope Simpson's 1965 gazetteer.[8] They had two children: Allan Hope Simpson (1962–2012), a writer, poet and musician,[37] and David (born 1965), an engineer.[38]
Hope Simpson's younger brother, Robert, predeceased him.[6] His elder brother, James,[5] also read classics (atQueens' College, Cambridge) after attendingShrewsbury School.[4] He had a long career as a schoolmaster in Britain, atThe King's School, Canterbury,Bedford School and in thecomprehensive sector.[4]
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