Love's Obsession Read online

  For some time Jim and Eleanor stayed with the Director of Antiquities, John Hilton, who also lent them his car to explore the island, and through him met the curator at the Cyprus Museum, Porphyrios Dikaios. Dikaios was interested in the earliest periods on Cyprus; Jim moaned that he had ‘Neolithic on the brain’. But Dikaios was helpful, and together they enjoyed debating theories and issues of disagreement—were the Neolithic connections of Cyprus with Anatolia? Was it a true Neolithic or rather Chalcolithic? Dikaios had excavated tombs in an Early Cypriot cemetery complex at Vounous in Northern Cyprus and recently the French archaeologist Claude Schaeffer had worked there as well. Jim puzzled at the pottery from these tombs, such crazy and bizarre shapes. Jim met all the people then working at the museum, recently reorganised and incorporated into a new Department of Antiquities. The assistant curator, Joan du Plat Taylor, had only just returned from two months leave in England during which time she had excavated a Roman forum site in Leicester with Kathleen Kenyon and it is likely the Stewarts met her at the museum. Perhaps they discussed her plans for a new handbook of the collection.

  Hilton’s appointment as the Director of Antiquities was not to last for much longer. Jim complained to Alan Wace that Rupert Gunnis, then Inspector of Antiquities, had ‘fomented complaints’, which had led to Hilton’s dismissal and imminent removal. According to local villagers, Gunnis also dealt in antiquities. This was more or less generally known, Jim said, both on the island and abroad amongst archaeologists—the Wellcome Museum in London had bought some of Gunnis’s collection and further pieces were sold at Sotheby’s in 1933. It was rumoured that Gunnis even instigated the plundering of a tomb by night and got the contents out either by signing his own export permits or by carrying it in his personal baggage, but there was no single incident that could be proved. Jim believed that Sir George Hill, Director of the British Museum, was trying to secure his dismissal for the tomb robbery and thought Porphyrios Dikaios at the Cyprus Museum could supply relevant information. Jim wrote to Wace in some length ‘because it seems to me a very serious matter’.38

  Jim’s concern is telling. A collector himself, wherever he travelled Jim hunted down coins and sat in cafes waiting expectantly for villagers to offer objects for sale. He had no qualms about this and most of what was offered he purchased legally. Most authorities granted export licences for antiquities bought from reputable dealers, although growing nationalist voices raised objections and changes would later come. Collectors feared these increasing restrictions, but the issue is complex. Everyone collected; being a serious archaeologist was irrelevant. During this period Jim collected sherds and bought pots for Lewis Clark at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Jim wrote regularly to Alan Wace describing the material he was sending and there is no suggestion of impropriety. Commercial dealing in antiquities by an Inspector of Antiquities was another matter, however, and Jim was scandalised.

  After Cyprus the Stewarts sailed for Greece but found Athens a disappointment and Jim thought the National Museum ‘a horrible mess’. They celebrated Christmas at the British School, enjoyed meeting Peter Megaw, who was about to take up a position in Cyprus, but found few other kindred spirits and in any case ‘Jim had a cold’. Greece suffered, he decided, by comparison with Cyprus.39 In January 1936 Jim and Eleanor finally arrived in Istanbul to prepare for the archaeological research the Wilkins Fellowship was to sponsor.

  Archaeology evokes mystery and romance. Eager young students dig into the earth with fine tools and fierce concentration, sifting through layer upon layer of dirt and mudbrick, searching for pottery sherds and listening for the dull clunk of metal. People squat in the dirt, their hair, clothes and heavy boots caked with mud or clay. Others stand at the sieves picking through small stones and grass for slivers of bone, while the director bends down with a tape measure to talk intently with a workman.

  The reality rarely meets expectations. Mostly, it is boring and routine and not all of it involves excavation. The Stewarts spent six months in Turkey but only a small proportion of this time involved excavation. For the remainder of the time, Jim and Eleanor visited museums and villages and walked or drove through the countryside with a notebook and camera. They drew and photographed objects in museums, all the while building a visual reference for use when they visited other museums, or when excavating. Their collection of photos and drawings, begun earlier in Australia, was little more than a personal field guide, but to Jim it was the beginning of something more, a ‘corpus’, a body of work. A collector at heart, Jim needed to hold things in his hands, to feel the shape and texture of objects, to own them. It was how he understood things.

  Collecting is a way of creating order, of grouping things, of putting them in place. It was then fashionable for children to collect objects, and boys and girls the world over filled albums with stamps or coins from countries they had scarcely heard of—Liechtenstein, Monaco, Bechuanaland. Most children lose interest quickly. Others become collectors. They sort and arrange, fiddle with cellophane packets and catalogue. But the dilemma—always—is how to arrange these stamps or coins. Should it be by date or colour, by country or size? How many different categories are there? Which is best? With fifty stamps it makes sense to sort one way, but what about when you have five hundred or five thousand? Maybe if you could collect all the stamps or coins you would know how best to arrange them, what categories to use. You would find the solution. This idea—of collating everything in order to understand it—was to remain with Jim. He needed the whole before he could understand the component parts. He pursued the idea and in turn it ensnared him.

  In the bazaars of Istanbul the Stewarts searched for antiquities and antiques. Jim joked that the dealers must read The Times40 because they knew exactly what the Wilkins Fellowship was worth and adjusted their prices accordingly. In nearby villages they visited popular cafes where locals brought objects to them. They bought some but were careful not to be fooled by forgeries, although Jim was equally fascinated by the skills of ancient metalworkers and modern forgers. Most of all Jim and Eleanor wanted information about where the objects came from, a time-honoured method of ‘finding’ sites. Although some villagers were forthcoming, others were not. A site with saleable objects was valuable, a bank to be drawn from, and there was little incentive to give it away. Jim had to win their trust.

  Jim’s research plans would not prove easy to realise because he hoped to conduct his own excavations in Turkey, to investigate new sites. Yet he seemed blithely unaware of the necessary formalities. On arrival in Istanbul Jim had met the foreign archaeological community and they were not optimistic. He called on Dr Schede and Kurt Bittel at the German Archaeological Institute. Schede was frankly discouraging, and in his very courteous manner hinted that their mission was foolish. It was quite easy to see sites which were known, but otherwise permits were difficult to get and it had taken Bittel three months to get one! It was impossible to explore without a commissioner, for which the Turkish Government would charge £4 sterling a week plus food and travelling expenses. Bittel suggested that, as they needed to pay for a commissioner in any case, why not make for a known site and dig test pits, or sondages, for a month? They decided to try for a newly looted site at, or near Balekeşir.41 From this distance it seems remarkably naïve that a student could arrive unannounced and expect to conduct excavations in a country he knew nothing about. It is equally mystifying that Cambridge would sponsor such an enterprise.

  For much of their time in Turkey Jim was forced to negotiate with the Turkish authorities. He was not good at it. In Istanbul and Ankara he had to deal with savvy politicians and bureaucrats. He spoke little Turkish, a foreigner with no understanding of the complexities of the country. He condemned the military, criticised the incompetence of museum officials and wrote to Alan Wace that, although his departmental contact ‘does try very hard to be scientific … they all have silly ideas in their blood, and no amount of Western teaching will overcome their natural
racial pride and stubbornness!’42 He persevered, railing against the authorities but determined to excavate, finally obtaining a permit to survey sites in the province of Balekeşir, in the northwest of Turkey, east of Çanakkale, where the site of Troy is located. In March he and Eleanor, together with ‘Johnny’, the Turkish Government representative, explored the region. Together they walked and drove and rode across the countryside looking for clues to what lay buried beneath.

  Though the earth is solid, it is not stationary. Time and insects and the movements of plants and animals grind and turn the soil, and objects long buried sink deeper or move to the surface. Everywhere in the Near East, when you bend to the earth, you find pottery. Broken tiles, rounded bases, sometimes the lip of a cup or a fragment of decoration. You are never alone in this landscape; all around are the stories of people who ate and drank and lived and loved at the very place where you stand. Days or decades or centuries or millennia ago a young woman broke her cooking pot and swept it out the doorway, a farmer dropped his knife on the way home and did not notice it was gone, a child lost her toy as she skipped home. These objects lie there, buried by wind and earth and, like the bones of long dead horses or cows or mammoths, are exposed when wind and water strip the earth away. From these fragments of life’s detritus archaeologists imagine stories and try to understand the things that are lost forever—the song the mother sang as she swept the floor, the worry about the failing crops, the childhood game.

  Jim was not immune to the romance of either archaeology or of travel. At twenty-three, and in the process of learning archaeology, he fell in love with a place—or was it the other way around? The two loves entwined. The landscapes and local cafes where the villagers brought pots to sell, the joys of riding in the open, of reaching down to find sherds scattered on the ground, the thrill of understanding the way a landscape has formed over time and the knowledge that one is only skimming over the surface. Everyone who loves archaeology comes to love the ground they walk on, to respect it.

  Like travellers before and since, Jim tried to describe their exotic life.

  Sometimes we would spend a night in a village as the guests of the villagers; at night, after the pilav … had been removed, we would sit on the floor with an ever growing circle of villagers about us, gossiping while the tobacco smoke thickened and the rain beat on the shutters … The talk would be of all things; how to convert a piece of rail into a good knife blade, the prospects of the tobacco crop, the quality of the local wool as compared to the English, what was London like, how far was it to England (How long would it take to go there?), where was Australia, did we find the drinking water here more palatable than in Stambul (where we think in beer, the Turk thinks in water) … With the spring came the flowers, and the storks, whose clamorous bill-clapping made sleep after dawn impossible, and the country became even more attractive: it was satisfying at sunset to see the cattle fording a river on their way back to a village, or to watch water buffalo wallowing in a mud pool; to ride … over the hills and across the valley, to lie beside a spring after lunch high up in the hills and survey the plains spread out like a map below … The friendliness of the people was more marked now that we were known, and when you’re coming home dirty from the day’s wander it is a pleasure to anticipate a hot bath and to know that your old friend at the eating shop will have put aside some choice kebub (little bits of meat strung on a spit and roasted over an open fire) and a dish of yogurt, however late you may be.43

  In fulfilment of his fellowship, Jim sent Alan Wace a report on the Prehistoric Sites in the Balekişir Region. The scholarship was Jim’s but the report is in Eleanor’s handwriting.

  At last Jim found a site that he wanted to excavate, near Babaköy in northwestern Turkey. It was, he claimed, where all the Yortan pots were coming from and he asked Wace if there was any way he could get extra funds to pay excavation costs. Fearing that the Wilkins money would not cover all his expenses, he planned joint excavations with Kurt Bittel. Wace advised Jim to apply for a Sladen scholarship, which he did, although in his application he failed to mention Bittel’s involvement in the project, or his determination to excavate with or without funding.44

  While waiting to finalise plans, the Stewarts visited Troy where the archaeologist Carl Blegan invited them to stay for a fortnight. The Sladen money came through and after much to-ing and fro-ing Stewart and Bittel began excavations at Babaköy, although Bittel initially refused to acquiesce to what he considered unreasonable Turkish demands. Bittel would do the planning and Jim was happy to learn. Eleanor was the photographer. Work would last only a week and was rushed. On the first day they arrived at three in the afternoon and had begun digging an hour later.45

  For only a little over three days Jim, Eleanor and Bittel excavated at different parts of the site but most of the tombs had already been damaged by ploughing or looting. One grave was a double burial. Today—in light of the scientific methods now common and the cultural sensitivities now recognised—it is distressing to read of the extraction of one skeleton: ‘the bones were riddled with fibre and nothing short of a cellulose spray outfit would have got them out; wax was useless and in the end we had to be content with a few long bones and the skull’.46

  Jim and Eleanor’s photographic catalogue was proving useful. Babaköy did indeed produce Yortan pottery, the distinctive black-slipped and burnished jugs common to Turkish burials and now known to date to the middle of the second millennium BCE. In one grave Jim found a Yortan pot identical in shape and style to a pot he had seen at the Cyprus Museum. The Cyprus pot came from Tomb 39 at Vounous and if the Vounous pot was, as Jim believed, a Yortan import, then this connection could be the key to linking sites in Cyprus and Turkey. This find alone might clarify relative chronologies in the Near East. It might prove the missing link.

  After Babaköy Jim and Eleanor spent a further two months excavating at Kusura in Anatolia, with the pioneering female archaeologist Winifred Lamb. In 1936 Winfred Lamb was forty-two and an experienced field archaeologist.47 As a member of the British School at Athens she had excavated at Mycenae, Sparta and in Macedonia and her experience as Honorary Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge extended her interests into later classical periods. Even so, she was a woman and her position at the museum was, and remained, unpaid. She wanted to investigate the connections between the northern Aegean, the Balkans and Anatolia and this led her to excavate the site of Thermi on the island of Lesbos between 1929 and 1933, and to visit Troy where she undertook a broad survey of the prehistoric mounds of the area surrounding the site. Now she was working at Kusura, where a provincial town had thrived on the route between Troy and Smyrna during the fourth millennium BCE.48

  Winifred was a friend of Max Mallowan’s wife, Agatha Christie, and of the writer Dorothy L. Sayers and tried her hand at crime-writing in a series of light-hearted short stories, including one called The Inspector Interferes, set on an excavation in Turkey. Twenty-four year old John Buchanan from Cambridge and his wife Lucy are probably based on Jim and Eleanor. John is sick in bed and Lucy, ‘a charming lady, oddly enough not as modern in her outlook as one would expect’ fusses over him. The Turkish Government representative, the inspector Halil Bey, is murdered—stabbed with a recently excavated bronze pin. Mustafa, a Turkish archaeologist proud of his progressive attitudes, adopts the role of Sherlock Holmes. Suspicion falls on John, whose hostility to the inspector is well known and whose arrogant display of petulance is embarrassing to friends and colleagues alike.

  He had been in bed for several days and now wore a Chinese dressing gown over his pyjamas. His face was paler than usual, and there were dark circles round his eyes, for he was still recovering from a bad attack of some kind of fever … ‘I know what you are all thinking’, Buchanan exclaimed ‘and I know that I said last night that I would like to kill him. But really I would not be such an ass. It’s just the sort of thing the dirty little beast would do, though, to get himself murdered and a
ll of us put in prison just when the dig is half way through …’49

  This was, after an initial surveying year, Lamb’s first excavation season at Kusura and digging lasted ten weeks. Jim worked on the cemetery, the results of which he hoped to publish, and maintained a detailed diary and pottery record. He and Eleanor thought Miss Lamb ‘great fun’50 and Winifred thought highly of Jim, believing he had ‘the most essential qualification for an archaeologist: a great enthusiasm for his profession’.51 Jim later admitted that she also saw his weaknesses. His worst fault, she warned, was his ‘seeking after perfection’, a flaw that, she cautioned, might inhibit him from publishing his ideas.52 Pedantic and demanding with others, in Jim himself this obsession could lead to paralysis.

  Another of Jim’s ‘faults’ emerged twenty years after the 1936 season at Kusura. Winifred Lamb faced a dilemma at the Fitzwilliam Museum when the renowned Turkish archaeologist Dr Halet Çambel was due to visit. Diplomatically, Winifred decided to remove from view the pots from Babaköy that Jim, she was fairly sure, had smuggled out of Turkey without a permit.53

  In August of 1936, after a year of travel and archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, Jim and Eleanor boarded a ship at Port Said for their return to England. They looked forward to being back in Park Cottage, but theirs was to be only a temporary return. In the column on the ship’s register listing ‘intended future permanent address’, they both wrote ‘foreign countries’.54

  Jim was determined to return to Cyprus and hoped to excavate at the Bronze Age cemetery of Vounous, in order ‘to test, as far as possible, the connections between Cyprus and Anatolia in the Early Bronze Age’.55 The cemetery was well known to archaeologists and tomb robbers alike and Jim now wrote seeking backing from colleagues, institutions and the all important Archaeological Joint Committee. In his letter of recommendation, Sir John Myers noted Stewart’s experience excavating with both Winifred Lamb and Kurt Bittel. Myers wrote formally to the Chief Secretary in Cyprus and informally to Peter Megaw, and gave Jim practical excavation advice and offered to lend him equipment.56 The great Australian prehistorian Gordon Childe was less positive. Although he felt there was a need to investigate the island’s prehistory, particularly ‘as Cyprus is still under the heel of British imperialism’, he doubted the value of excavating yet more tombs, given the amount of work the Swedes had done. Childe complained bitterly at the failure of excavators to publish, and doubted Jim would get any financial support.57