Evans and his colleage david hogarth established a Cretan Exploration Fund, with links to the British School in Athens, and with Evans’s private resources began to excavate. In the first year, the general plan of the Bronze Age palace of knossos was uncovered, and the “throne room” and “magazines” were revealed. Other finds included the first of the marvelous frescoes, traded items from Egypt and babylon, and tablets covered with linear script. Intensive excavation of the site continued for the next eight years and was largely financed by Evans, whose success at Knossos encouraged more excavations on Crete and in Greece proper.

Of equal importance to his excavations were Evans’s self-funded efforts to restore the palace of Minos. Although Evans’s motivations were to make the site comprehensible to others and to stabilize it, he was greatly criticized for compromising conservation in favor of restoration and worked at the site to that end until 1931. Between 1921 and 1936, Evans’s most enduring legacy, the book The Palace of Minos at Knossos, was published.

Evans resigned from the Ashmolean in 1908 and worked for the Hellenic Society and the British Schools in Athens and Rome. He transferred all of his property on Crete to the British School in Athens, and during the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I, he tirelessly lobbied the British government to support an independent Yugoslavia. He was an accomplished draftsman, numismatist, collector, and excavator, and his artistic tastes were matched by his deductive flair. His development of the chronology of Knossos was a tour de force.

Tim Murray

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 218–219.

Evans, Sir John

(1823–1908)

Born in Buckinghamshire, England, and educated at his headmaster father’s school, John Evans intended to go to Oxford but instead traveled to Germany. On his return in 1840, he joined his uncle’s paper-manufacturing business, John Dickinson and Company, of which he became a partner in 1850. Although he was an excellent businessman, and did not retire from the company until 1885, he also pursued many interests that lay outside the field of his employment. These included geology and palaeontology, which led him to accompany geologist sir joseph prestwich to France, as an assistant, to visit French palaeontogist jacques boucher de perthes and examine chipped flints from the Somme gravels.

Evans and Prestwich were convinced that the stone tools were indeed proof of human antiquity in western Europe, and Evans began to collect stone and bronze implements, to visit cave sites, and to publish his findings. Evans also collected and published on fossil remains of extinct animals and the provenance, typology, and distribution of medieval antiquities, Anglo-Saxon and Lombardic jewelry, posy-rings, bronze weapons, and ornaments. His real area of expertise was in numismatics, and his collections of ancient British money, Roman emperor gold coins, and Anglo-Saxon and English coins were unique. He also contributed more than a hundred items to the Numismatic Chronicle and the standard works on British coins.

Evans was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1864 and was the society’s vice-president from 1876 to 1878 and then its treasurer from 1878 to 1898. He was president of the Geological Society from 1874 to 1876, and in 1880, he received the Lyell Medal for his services to geology, particularly post-tertiary geology, and for developing the relationship between archaeology and geology. At various times in his busy life, he was a member and president of the society of antiquaries of london, the Numismatic Society of London, the Anthropological Institute, the egypt exploration society, the Society of Arts, the Paper-makers Association, and the British Association. He was also a trustee of the british museum and was awarded many academic honors in England and abroad, as well as being on one occasion high sheriff of Hertfordshire. He left his collections to his son sir arthur evans, who in turn presented portions of them to the ashmolean museum in Oxford.