Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 37

and ask her advice rather than to The High Command, who tended to float above the melee.

Over the years since I was at Knidos, I have listened to some very unkind things spoken about those in charge of the dig. Several local Turkish archaeologists have more recently totally pooh-poohed their ideas quite publically, along with their methods and their results. A number of other American archaeologists have recounted outrageous stories which they say were circulating, of dynamite being used to remove difficult objects from the excavation, of not grasping the elements of basic techniques, and of riding rough-shod over the local people. I have to say I saw none of these things, and always have thought of such stories as more a case of them venting generalised academic spleen than anything at all realistic. Relations on the dig might have been a touch brittle now and again, as they so often are in such unfamiliar circumstances, but they were not impossible; certainly the Director of the whole operation was really encouraging to the underlings on the staff, me included. And, consciously or otherwise, the excavation gave me the opportunity to soak up all there was to learn about this beautiful site, on my own, without interference. For that I will always express my heartfelt thanks, though some over-serious Classicists have sometimes suggested that there were plenty of other sites that would have been more educational. I have to say that I don’t think so!

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But I read that one or two of the Management were nothing if not controversial with other contemporary scholars. One incident, widely reported at the time, stands out amongst several contretemps that came about; this one relates to the British Museum and the material that had been brought back there in the 1850’s by C. T. Newton. Some time during excavation at Knidos it was decided to look at Newton’s discoveries stored in the Museum’s vaults in London to see if there was anything which might relate to the current

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