Q and A with Jack Davis

What were your first impressions of the ASCSA when you arrived to take up your fellowship in 1974?

I really wish now that I had my notebooks to hand!  They are packed, in Cincinnati.  But, reaching back in my memory, I largely remember my arrival at the School as a rather intimidating experience.  One had a sense of great isolation from family and friends in the U.S.  Communications were difficult: phone lines echoed, if one were fortunate to make a connection at all.  And of course there was almost never a chance to acquire a private phone.  I came at a time too when Greece was still under control of the juncta.  Athens could be frightening, even potentially dangerous.  There were protests and riots and then the Cyprus invasion.  I was on Kea when the Colonels were brought there under arrest on a naval destroyer.  When we returned to Athens at the end of the summer, new blooms had already taken hold.  Politics were on everyone’s mind and it was hard to guess what lay ahead.  Still, changes and a certain freshness were in the air, symbolically manifested in Theordorakis’s presentation of his orchestral and choral production of Pablo Neruda’s Canto General in the Olympic Stadium (previously planned to premier in Santiago, Chile, but cancelled by Allende’s assassination).  What would be the role of an American institution in this new Greece?

How has Athens and Greece changed since you first visited?

Wow.  Where to begin?  There is nothing one can’t buy in Athens now.  This is an enormous change.  Huge supermarkets.  Easy transportation, particularly on the Metro.  English as the principal second language (rather than French).  High-speed Internet.  Good roads have transformed a trip to Corinth from Athens from a 2-day affair into a realist commute.  That sense of isolation has all but evaporated.

What do you think are the major challenges and opportunities for the School over the next five years?

The School certainly is not, as they say, your mother’s or father’s institution any more.  Its size and structure is far more complex than one can perhaps imagine without becoming fully involved in its operation.  I know this fact has been a surprise both to myself and to Mary Sturgeon. Just for comparison: in 1974 there were 30 on staff, while today we have nearly 100; the social list of the School was then 300, now it is 2100.  The [Blegen] library was closed; now it is open to more than 2000 card-carrying users.

What are your top three ambitions for the School?

I’m not certain I can name only three, or even three, distinct ambitions (all are inter-related)!  One significant goal is to try to work to communicate the activities of the School clearly both to members in Athens and internationally.  Sometimes we in Athens can forget that we are only a subset (and a rather small one at that) of a much larger academic community that has a stake in what we do and in the programs we offer.  That larger community needs to be informed and served also, probably in ways that we have yet to imagine; but the new Web site should begin to bring the entire School community closer together in a significant way.  Here in Greece, I am exploring ways in which the School can reach out more to the community, academic and otherwise.  One new activity will involve holding the Open Meeting of the School in Thessaloniki as well as in Athens.  I also will work to bring a greater sense of unity to the School community in Athens. Here, I think, it is important to incorporate further the Agora and Corinth into the life of the School.  Our overall program should also flow naturally from the study of Antiquity to modern Greece.  This latter objective is one on which Maria Georgopoulou, director of the Gennadius Library, and I are focused.  We should also not lose sight of the fact that, however we define ourselves, to most of the population of Greece, we are a school of archaeology.  I want to work with the directors of fieldwork, both sponsored and affiliated, as they explore new ways of bringing the results of their research to the citizens of Greece in ways meaningful to them, as well as to us.

Now that you are in Greece full-time, is there a part of the country you and Shari would like to explore that you haven’t previously?

I have always wanted to travel more in the islands.  As a student, I was generally bound to particular islands, notably Kea and Melos, where I was involved in specific research projects.  Since then, Shari and I have had the chance to travel on two occasions in the Cyclades with our friend, Mariza Marthari, Ephor of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities, and we hope to do more of that sort of thing.  We also hope to spend more time in Epiros, especially along the border with Albania.  Hiking in the uplands of the Zagorohoria has a great appeal and we have friends who live in extremely isolated villages on the Albanian side of the border whom we are keen to visit.

What advice would you give new students arriving at the American School today?

Take advantage of the opportunities offered by this marvelous city.  Get to know it on all levels, culturally as well as historically.  Try to learn Greek, but, even if not, find a Greek “parea.”  Get out of the School community when you have the chance and the riches that you return to the School and to yourself will be greater.  Reach out to students in the other foreign schools and at the Greek universities.  People there of your generation will be your colleagues and even friends for life.  America may be left out of the EU, but there is a large, vital, intellectual community in Athens and in Greece, and we can all be a part of that.  And more generally, the advice of Augustus Merriam, director of the School in 1887-88, is still valid: to paraphrase, don’t plan to do things in Greece that you can do at home in the library!

What do you think are the most interesting trends in Classical Studies, and Hellenic Studies more broadly, at present?

We are now, indeed, and have always been members of an interdisciplinary undertaking.  Where other fields are still discovering the joys (and sometimes frustrations) of working across disciplines, Classicists have been doing this for generations.  In fact, the encouragement of such an approach to the past was in the minds of the founders of the School.  What I find especially interesting at the moment is the balance that is beginning to emerge within Classical studies.  We are beginning to see studies now that are seriously attempting to respect all evidence pertinent to particular problems, and to evaluate these on separate and equal footings.  From my own perspective, it is heartwarming to find philologists who are finding meaning in material cultural studies that is not represented in texts, rather than, as had been the case for so long, viewing archaeological data only as ancillary to, or illustrative of, texts.  The establishment of dialectics between various categories of evidence can only be to the benefit of the field of Hellenic studies as a whole.  Also encouraging, from my point of view, is the new respect that seems to be given by scholars based at the School to all periods of the past– even the rather recent.  This is an attitude that is very much in agreement with the Mission Statement of the School.

What scholarly projects are you working on at the moment?

I have a lot to publish.  This fall, Hesperia Supplement 40 will appear. It consists of papers from a workshop focusing on post-Byzantine Greece, especially the interaction between Venetians and Ottomans, that I have co-edited with Siriol Davies of the British School at Athens.  Then I hope to make good progress in compiling a final report on our excavations of a new Greek sanctuary that we excavated in Albania in 2004-2006.  The earliest levels there date to the late 7th century B.C.  In addition to Shari and me, others from the ASCSA community are involved in that effort, notably Kathleen Lynch from the Agora staff, my colleague at the University of Cincinnati.

And what will Shari be working on during your tenure there?

Shari this year is completing a catalogue of the archaeological sites that we documented in fieldwork in the hinterland of the Greek colony at Apollonia in Albania between 1998 and 2003.  She has also studied the pattern of settlement in the area and how it changed through time, from the beginning of the Greek colony until Roman times.  When she finishes, this work will form the core of a full report on our research there.

Are you going to have any time to do fieldwork and, if so, where?

Probably not, if by fieldwork we mean fieldwork of the traditional sorts! But Shari (and I with her) remain very much involved in the study for publication of finds from the excavations of Carl Blegen and Marion Rawson from the Palace of Nestor at Pylos.  As you know, since 1997, she has been coordinating a now large team of scholars who are reexamining both published and unpublished finds from those excavations.  As a result there have been a number of surprising new discoveries: e.g., Hariclia Brecoulaki of the Wiener Lab has restored much of a Ship Fresco, similar in some details to that from Akrotiri on Thera, which is much earlier in date; and Susanne Hofstra of ASCSA has located and documented many previously unpublished small finds at use when the Palace was destroyed.  This research will continue.

Has your dog Prap come along? What is his attitude to the School cat (and vice versa)?

Prap has always spent the time that we are in Greece at what we call “Doggy Summer Camp” - a.k.a., my in-laws summer home in Gaylord, Michigan.  This year he decided to skip Greece and to follow them on their southern migration back to the Florida Keys in October.  Hey, it’s a dog’s life! Instead, we are joined in Athens by our kitties, Genci (a modern Albanian name equivalent to that of the Illyrian king, Genthios, in Greek) and Kalypso (who needs no introduction).  Genci came with us in June, meowing nearly non-stop in the cabin from Atlanta to Athens; the stewardess reported that fellow-passengers suggested a number of solutions to the problem, none of them very humane!).  Kalypso will join us at the beginning of September.

You have been working for a number of years on archival records relating to the history of the School. Have you come across any surprises?

I have, but perhaps not all are yet ready for prime time!  Lately, in a spare moment here and there I have been transcribing two exciting notebooks kept by Carl Blegen when he was traveling in northern Greece and across the borders in the wake of the Bulgarian retreat after WW I.  There was then a disaster for the local populations there and members of ASCSA such as Blegen, Bert Hodge Hill, and Richard Seager, participated in relief missions sponsored by the American Red Cross under the command of Captain Edward Capps, chairman of our Managing Committee.  The commitment of our members is astounding, as is the fact that they managed to integrate archaeological survey into their fundamental humanitarian mission.