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prehistoric site of Korakou in Corinthia (1915– 1916). Blegen and Wace were convinced that although Minoan in origin Mycenean civilization was not the result of the conquest of mainland Greece, as argued by sir arthur evans, but was a combination of Minoan civilization with another civilization on the mainland.
To elucidate the relationship between Mycenean and Minoan civilization Wace began excavating Mycenae in 1921 (and finished, after many interruptions, in 1955) while Blegen investigated Troy, which he regarded as a key Aegean and Anatolian site. Between 1932 and 1938 Blegen tested sections of the mound that had not been touched by heinrich schliemann and wilhelm dorpfeld, finding that the previously identified nine cities of Troy only represented two or more phases in the Bronze Age out of a total of forty-six phases. He attributed Homer’s Troy to the major period VIIa (ca. 1250 b.c.) because there was strong evidence that the city was destroyed by war.
In 1939 Blegen returned to mainland Greece to find the Mycenean capital of Messinia, which Homer had said belonged to “King Nester of Pylos.” He excavated the hilltop of Espano Englianos and found a Mycenean palace, the excavation of which was not completed until 1966. The palace of Pylos was much better preserved and more carefully excavated than those at Mycenae or Tiryns, even if it was not as large. While its layout and decoration were similar to those of Minoan palaces, it was more fundamentally like Greek Mycenean palaces. In this architectural analysis Blegen had accurately defined the extent of Minoan influence on Mycenean Greece. Of equal importance were hundreds of clay tablets inscribed with early European script and dating from ca.1250 b.c. discovered by Blegen at Pylos. Blegen’s account of the history of Pylos received important confirmation when michael ventris deciphered Linear B in 1951.
See also
Bogazköy is the site of the ancient city of Hattusha, the capital of the Hittites. Located in north-central Anatolia (turkey), Bogazköy was first discovered in 1834 by French archaeologist Charles Felix Marie Texier, who also recorded bas relief carvings of humans and animals and some unusual hieroglyphs. The site was further described on several occasions during the late-nineteenth century, but it was not until 1906 when Hugo Winckler (an Assyriologist) began to excavate that a great archive of cuneiform tablets was uncovered. Some of these were in Hittite, but a sufficiently large number were in Akkadian, an ancient language that had already been deciphered. Excavation by German teams at Bogazköy has continued and has revealed much about Hittite history.
After the discovery of the New World, the Spanish colonial system was established in a large part of the Americas, including what is now Bolivia. During this period, early Spanish chroniclers started to describe the customs, traditions, and monuments of native cultures.
An extensive array of documents was produced, such as the early chronicles and descriptions by both Spaniards and Creoles, legal and litigant documents, and administrative censuses for taxes. Such efforts have had a variety of purposes: they provide the information needed to “adapt” the native socioeconomic institutions into the colonial system; to “civilize” and christianize the Indians; to claim ancient rights pertaining to land, wealth, and status in favor of native elites; or to denounce the abuses of Indians on the part of theSpanish authorities and encomenderos. Because of the varied nature of such documents, each provides a different perspective on the impact that the colonial system had on native Bolivian populations. These documents are also of great anthropological value for understanding complex cultural variability in the Andes and for an accurate combination of the archaeological and ethnohistorical disciplines in the reconstruction of the prehistoric Bolivian past.
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