Spyridon Marinatos

Spyridon Nikolaou Marinatos (Σπυρίδων Νικολάου Μαρινάτος; 17 November 1901 – 1 October 1974) was a Greek archaeologist who specialised in the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations.

Spyridon Nikolaou Marinatos was born in Lixouri on the Ionian island of Kephallonia on 17 November 1901.

His father was a carpenter.

Marinatos studied at the University of Athens from 1916, where he competed unsuccessfully with Christos Karouzos for a scholarship, beginning a lifelong rivalry between the two.

He joined the Greek Archaeological Service in 1919, and spent much of his early career on the island of Crete, where he excavated several Minoan sites, served as director of the Heraklion Museum, and formulated his theory that the collapse of Neopalatial Minoan society had been the result of the eruption of the volcanic island of Santorini around 1600 BCE.

Marinatos joined the Greek Archaeological Service in 1919 and was first posted to Crete as an epimeletes (junior archaeological official).

He conducted excavations on Crete between 1919 and 1952.

His early excavations on Crete included the Minoan villa at Amnisos.

Marinatos was one of the first thirty-six students of the "Practical School of Art History", an archaeological training centre established by the Archaeological Society of Athens at the request of the Greek government, studying there in the 1919–1920 academic year.

The school's instructors included noted archaeologists and folklorists such as Panagiotis Kavvadias, Christos Tsountas, Konstantinos Kourouniotis, Antonios Keramopoulos and Nikolaos Politis (folklorist), while his fellow students included Karouzos and Semni Papaspyridi, later Karouzos's wife.

Between 1921 and 1925, Marinatos completed military service in the Hellenic Army.

He received his doctorate in 1925, with a dissertation supervised by the archaeologist Georgios Oikonomos on the depiction of marine animals in Minoan art.

In June 1926, Marinatos met the British archaeologist Arthur Evans at the site of Knossos, which Evans had been excavating since 1900: both had travelled to the site to assess the damage of an earthquake.

Evans would become an influence on his theories of contact between Minoan Crete and ancient Egypt, and on his study of natural disasters in prehistory.

He arrived at Berlin in 1927, where his teachers included the philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and the archaeologist Gerhart Rodenwaldt.

Marinatos and Evans quarrelled in 1928–1929, when he challenged Evans over a trial excavation that the latter had initiated at Knossos without a permit, but Marinatos subsequently became Evans's long-term friend and intellectual supporter.

He attended Halle on a scholarship, which he won in 1928 while serving as deputy to Stefanos Xanthoudidis, the senior ephor (archaeological inspector) of eastern Crete.

At Halle, he studied under Georg Karo, who had excavated at the Mycenaean site of Tiryns and was working on the publication of the finds from Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Mycenae.

Xanthoudidis died suddenly in 1929; Marinatos returned early from Halle to succeed him, and was appointed as senior ephor of eastern Crete in March 1929.

He served as director of the Heraklion Museum from 1929 until 1937.

He considered his monthly salary of 3,500 drachmas inadequate, and told a Cretan newspaper that he was considering leaving archaeology over it.

In the late 1930s, he was close to the quasi-fascist dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas, under whom he initiated legislation to restrict the roles of women in Greek archaeology, and was an enthusiastic supporter of the junta of the 1960s and 1970s.

His leadership of the Archaeological Service has been criticised for its cronyism and for promoting the pursuit of grand discoveries at the expense of good scholarship.

In 1930, inspired by Evans, he gave a lecture in which he argued that the destruction of the site of Knossos had been caused by an earthquake.

Other sites Marinatos excavated on Crete included Messara, Sklavokampos, the Geometric temple at Dreros, Tylissos and Eileithyia Cave.

As was common practice for Greek archaeologists at the time, Marinatos studied in Germany; he attended the Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Halle.

During his time on Crete, Marinatos was credited with thwarting the efforts of local goldsmiths to produce and sell forged antiquities, which were commissioned by antiquities traders: he also successfully prosecuted Nikolaos Pollakis, a Cretan priest, in 1931 for illegal antiquities trading.

He excavated at Arkalochori Cave in central Crete in 1934–1935, assisted by the epimeletes Nikolaos Platon, where he uncovered the Arkalochori Axe.

Between 1934 and 1935, Marinatos excavated a Mycenaean cemetery on his native island of Kephallonia, where he discovered two chamber tombs.

In 1936–1937, he undertook a lecture tour of the United States: his former teacher Karo, who had fled there from antisemitic persecution in Germany, asked Marinatos to forward on his behalf a series of postcards from Greece to various addresses in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Unsure of Karo's intentions, Marinatos gave the letters to his benefactor Elizabeth Humlin Hunt, in whose home he had been staying, to dispose of: she handed them to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

This began a chain of allegations against Karo which, while ultimately dismissed as unproven, saw him labelled an "Enemy Alien" and denied US citizenship.

Marinatos served three times as head of the Greek Archaeological Service, firstly between 1937 and 1939, secondly between 1955 and 1958, and finally under the military junta which ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Marinatos surveyed and excavated widely in the region of Messenia in southwest Greece, collaborating with Carl Blegen, who was engaged in the simultaneous excavation of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos.

He also discovered and excavated the battlefield of Thermopylae and the Mycenaean cemeteries at Tsepi and Vranas near Marathon in Attica.

He is best known for the excavation of the Minoan site of Akrotiri on Santorini, which he conducted between 1967 and 1974.

A recipient of several honours in Greece and abroad, he was considered one of the most important Greek archaeologists of his day.

A native of Kephallonia, Marinatos was educated at the University of Athens, at the Humboldt University of Berlin and at the University of Halle.

His early teachers included noted archaeologists such as Panagiotis Kavvadias, Christos Tsountas and Georg Karo.

Marinatos died while excavating at Akrotiri in 1974, and is buried at the site.