"Deirmendere, Asia Minor, April 13, 1922. The excavation house is now in a little better order than it was yesterday and the day before... When both the tents were pitched, we gave the two ladies [Hetty Goldman and Lulu Eldrigde] the choice of living quarters and of course they took the lower tent, which we all claim to be better... The beds we have were shipped from Athens in large wooden boxes and we are using these boxes now as our bureaus..." wrote young Benjamin Meritt (23 years old) to his fiancée Elizabeth Kirkland from Colophon.
He, together with several other American archaeologists from the ASCSA, had just arrived at Smyrna to participate in the excavation of Colophon, under the direction of Hetty Goldman and Carl Blegen. By June of 1922 the team, after two months of hard work, would head back to Athens not suspecting that this was the first and last excavation season for Colophon... No, they did not have the faintest inkling of what was about to happen two months later.
Leda Costaki, our Research Archivist, has just catalogued the excavation records of the Colophon Excavations. The photos are amazing (and all digitized, thanks to Ulrike Muss of the University of Vienna who is currently surveying Colophon), as you can see from the small sample that we have uploaded here. We would also like to thank Bryn Mawr College (Special Collections and Joan Reilly) for augmenting the School's Colophon archive with more records from Hetty Goldman's papers at BMC.