18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reception Theory and Victorian Psychosis by Example, October 12, 2000
This review is from: Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth (Hardcover)
Sandy MacGillivray's in depth analysis of the life and times of pioneer Cretan archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans was a pure joy to read. The author's own experiences as a professional in the field on Crete add great weight to his arguments as he finds himself coping the Evans' legacy on a daily basis. I really got the sense that the author knew Evans, both the man and the scholar, through close attention to and extensive research on the amply available primary sources. This is a wonderfully scholarly, yet very readable and highly interesting book to both the professional archaeologist and interested armchair amateur.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Revenge of "Modern" Archaeology, August 24, 2005
This review is from: Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth (Hardcover)
Minotaur by Joseph MacGillivray
This book presents itself as a readable biography of one the great Archaeologists, Sir Arthur Evans, instead of a thoughtful biography the book is really a prolonged attack on Evans (and 19th century archaeology) by an author of dubious credentials and makes for extremely painful reading.
The book is tolerable journalism when its sticks to the factual events, but it is so filled with hostility towards Evans, that the reader is quickly bogged down in a long winded and poorly researched series of ad hominen attacks and innuendo of wrong doing that the thrill of Crete and Minos is completely buried.
The central claim of this bad book is that Evans created Minoan archaeology and did not discover anything. The attacks are unrelenting. The author claims variously : Evans is unscientific and concerned only with objects, stole antquities, horded valuable linear B scripts, was a repressed homosexual, took too much credit for his finds and harmed nearly all of his colleagues, was shrewd and calculating to excess in his business dealings, was a racist because his disliked Turks and personally favored European and Greek religion and culture, was a spoiled wealthly aristocrat of no ability but gifted merely by birth and social standing- who also ate very well, etc etc etc
That the author has issues with Evans is an understatement and parrying all of his attacks (most of which are the authors own unsubstantiated suspicions or irelevant details) is a waste of time.
Evans- the gentlemen and scholar who devoted his 90 years of life to classics, beauty in art and history, who spent his fortune to dig Knossos and who developed new theories of myth and civilization: in short a person whose name will be recalled as long as history-minded Western man is revered- is not present in this book. This book is the product of a modern academic archaeology resentful of its romantic past, that prefers digging with toothbrushes, hates coin collectors, believes antiquities dealers are evil and wishes that British, Germans and French had left everything in the ground for them to sniff about with white gloves and a microscope.
That the author is an academic feather-weight is evident in the opening pages, where he attempts to work out his own crude thesis: Evans was not an archaeologist but a myth maker motivated by sexual demons. His analysis is so bad, reading his turns of phrase are like chewing on sand: "Archaeologists are the progenitors as well as the midwives at the birthing process we call excavation." Ugly writing quickly leads to bad analysis such as this delphic prose: " ...we must start with Evans himself, the product of his genes and his life experiences." These experiences include the alleged homosexuality of Evans which the author tries to awkwardly weave into his book perhaps hoping to increase sales, but he cannot find much and we are left with a few sentences of inane writing worthy only of a freshman trying to impress a bored teaching assistant. He writes that he suspects Evans was driven to pursue his career because of the "repressed 'beastliness' of his homosexuality..." His efforts degenerate further a few hundred pages later with innuendo about a young man Evans adopted and his association with Baden Powell and the Boy Scout movement.
The author has no wit and his style wears the reader down. He makes no effort in the biography to educate the reader about the civilization of Crete and takes the excitement of the past away completely. I know of no other book on archaeology that deadens its subject matter to such a degree. The author is all over the place with his own insipid thoughts and at times contradicts his own thin analysis.
For example the author continually harps on the fact that Evan's sister titled her biography of him, "Time and Chance". The author writes "Nothing could be further from what I believe about how Evans discovered Knossos..."(p.6) In his effort to bring Evans down from his perch the author continually paints Evans as simply a digger with money. At the end of his book, the author returns to this theme: "Arthur Evans did not stumble upon Knossos by some happy circumstance. He set his mind on acquiring the rights to a well-documented site.... he secured the expertise he lacked in the person of a site foreman, architects, and conservators..." (p.308) Ok this attack may work in hindsight, but on page 175 the author himself writes: "they all faced the risk that within a few hours they might have removed only a thin layer of eroded soil and exposed a solid rock outcropping scattered with worthless pot shards... Evans might learn that he had chased off the other suitors only to find the bride barren of promise and her dowry worthless. These are the risks excavators take." Which is it? Did Evans simply walk in and dig up what everyone knew was there or did chance play a role and did he finally locate the fabled city of Knossos after three and a half millenium? Clearly this writer is a moron.
A good graduate student should set things right and demolish MacGillivray's shoddy research on Evans, a student of history with a sense of the classical- not one inspired while waiting to use public tennis courts in Manhattan as MacGillivray says he was. Surely some inspiration can still be found in the stones of ruined cities, a brilliant gemstone or winds of the Mediterranean.
The author, in writing this extended effort to libel the dead, succeeds only in diminishing our native appreciation of history, and our myths. That is the end point of modernity.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Digs up a lot of dirt, September 17, 2011
This is a biography of the excavator and controversial rebuilder of the alleged "Palace of Minos." The account of the findings and imaginative reconstructions at Knossos is long and detailed. For some readers that might be the primary interest of the book but for others it could get tedious. I'd recommend Chadwick's "Decipherment of Linear B" if you're only going to read one book about prehistoric Crete.
MacGillivray has interesting things to say about the role of archeology and philology in racism. The coda at the end brings us up to the decipherment of Linear B.
One gets the impression that the biographer does not like Arthur Evans very much. To some extent his achievements were the results of circumstances, and his reputation was inflated. He was a childless man of immense wealth, was waited on hand and foot by servants, and able to pursue whatever interested him. We almost feel jealous, but then there is the issue of his sexuality. The conflict between his impulses and his need for public approval must have been a torment. Cyril Connolly in "Enemies of Promise" suggested that homosexuality was a help to creativity because it stopped people from being encumbered by family obligations. MacGillivray also offers more Freudian explanations of the possible links between sex and archeology.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
