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Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Germany in 1955.

Tim Murray

Lindenschmidt, Ludwig

(1809–1893)

German prehistorian and scholar who helped to found the Romisch-Germanische Zentral Museum at Mainz, where he was director until his death.

During the first half of the nineteenth century Germany, like England, was full of enthusiastic antiquarians eagerly excavating and founding museums and equally eager to establish a significant and ancient German past. This latter obsession was the result of contemporary German political fragmentation, which would persist until the 1870s. Political fragmentation was reflected in the fragmentation of collections of archaeological material—of find contexts and artifacts and scholarship—unlike in Scandinavia, where christian j. thomsen, bror hildebrand, and hans hildebrand were beginning to organize and study large, national, and lengthy homogenous archaeological collections and consequently develop theories, such as the three age system, about European prehistory.

In 1866 Lindenschmidt was one of the founding editors of the periodical Archiv fur Anthropologie, which became the forum for German anthropologists who lacked any formal and national organizations. In 1870, the same year as German political unification, the German Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory was founded. The Archiv became its journal, and continued to be published until World War II. Lindenschmidt, like his fellow prehistorians, was interested in “archae-geography,” the elucidation of ethnic questions via archaeological evidence, issues that occurred in the work of rudolf virchow and continued with gustaf kossinna. This preoccupation explains their critical stance toward, and even rejection of, the Three-Age theory. Until the 1880s Lindenschmidt refused to accept the idea of separate Bronze and Iron Ages and continued to emphasize the importance of southern Europe and the Mediterranean for the development of prehistoric metallurgy in central Europe.

Tim Murray

Linear A/Linear B

The Linear B script was in used in Minoan Crete and Mycenaean greece in the period between 1450 and 1200 b.c. An earlier script, called Linear A, had been devised in Crete in the period between 1700 and 1450 b.c. Linear B has been translated, but Linear A still provides a challenge.

The story of the decipherment of Linear B really begins with English archaeologist sir arthur evans at knossos, the royal city of Crete, at the beginning of the twentieth century. During his excavations at that site, Evans discovered many small clay tablets covered with linear script. These were different from the hieroglyphs, which he had also observed carved into seals and small gems, found by himself (and others) on Crete and in Greece. Beginning in 1909 with the publication of Scripta Minoa I, Evans was able to publish only a small fraction of the tablets he had excavated by the time the fourth volume of the Palace of Minos was published in 1935. The point has often been made (not least by those most directly responsible for the translation of Linear B) that this slow rate of publication may have delayed the eventual decipherment of Linear B, but it is equally true that subsequent discoveries such as American archaeologist carl blegen’s 1939 recovery of the Mycenaean archive at the Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Greece provided vital clues.

Building on work by A.E. Cowley, Alice Kober, and E.J. Bennett, Jr., a young English architect Michael Ventris (1922–1956)—at first working essentially alone but later with the Cambridge philologist John Chadwick—was able to overcome the problems posed by the shortage of published texts to produce the fundamentals of a decipherment of Linear B in