Five years ago, on the western edge of the greek peloponnesus, Sharon Stocker stood before a darkened basement door and wondered if going inside was such a good idea. As a doctoral student in classics at the University of Cincinnati, Stocker was trying to track down a particular group of Bronze Age pottery sherds for her thesis work. Her search had led her to a small archaeological museum in the village of Hora and an underground storeroom that had been opened only rarely in 30 years. "The museum guards opened the door very slowly, and then they stepped back," Stocker recalls. "There were just tons of stuff in there. I immediately thought about asking the guards to close up again. Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack."
Stocker forced herself from sunlight into the dark. Then, as her eyes adjusted, she made out some order among the rough wooden boxes and sagging cardboard barrels that were closely packed right to the ceiling. Some still carried greetings from the American people—relics of the U.S. food relief program during the Greek civil war in the 1940s. Stocker began to peek under lids and poke among bundles wrapped in yellowing newsprint, their labels fading toward blank. She stopped to read a wooden identification tag and to admire a Greek newspaper from the 1960s with a picture of a young Jackie Kennedy wearing a pillbox hat. The filthier Stocker's hands got, the happier she became. There were tons of pottery fragments and other ancient detritus stored there. And there were animal bones, lots of them. More than 3,000 years earlier, these animals fed the inhabitants of a great hilltop palace in the southwest corner of Greece. Their remains had been excavated on April 4, 1939, in what may have been the luckiest first day in archaeological history. That day, Carl Blegen, Stocker's predecessor at the University of Cincinnati, was digging an exploratory trench through an olive grove when one of his workmen lifted a clay tablet from the soil. Lightly brushing away the dirt, Blegen saw at once that the tablet was incised in Linear B, an undeciphered script known from Bronze Age Crete and never before seen on the Greek mainland. That spring, before war closed in on Greece, Blegen raced to unearth hundreds more tablets, providing the critical mass for deciphering the script. The tablets revealed that the people of this hilltop palace wrote in an early form of Greek. Although they never named their king, Blegen became convinced that his name was Nestor. Nestor. To students of classical literature, the name is a piece of fiction. In Homer's Iliad, a sage old king named Nestor joins Agamemnon in the war on Troy and fires up the troops with tales of his youthful exploits. In Book 3 of the Odyssey, Telemachus begins his quest for his long-lost father, Odysseus, at "sandy Pylos," Nestor's kingdom. When Telemachus runs his ship's keel ashore at dawn, he finds the wise but long-winded king on the beach, his people assembled around him:
This olive grove in southwestern Greece is the site of one of the luckiest digs in archaeological history—and one of its most fascinating controversies.Photographs courtesy of Pylos Regional Archaeological Project (PRAP).
