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Harriet Boyd and the Excavation of Gournia
Harriet Boyd Hawes, in a photo from ca. 1910.
Harriet
Boyd Hawes (1871-1945), the discoverer of Gournia, was the first
American to excavate a Minoan site in Crete. In 1896 she obtained a
fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens,
Greece. In the spring of 1900, Boyd visited Knossos and met Arthur
Evans, already in his first season of excavating the palace. Evans
encouraged her to look for an early Iron Age site located at Kavousi on
the Isthmus of Ierapetra (a post-Mycenaean occupation from ca. 1100-800
BC). By 1901, Boyd had begun excavating Kavousi, on which she would
write her master's thesis at Smith College.
Boyd's most
significant contribution to archaeology, however, is her investigation
of the Minoan settlement at Gournia, located in east-central Crete.
Visible ruins, including stone basins ("gournes" in Greek) preserved in
the area, led to the site's name. First shown the location by a local
peasant, between 1901 and 1905 she excavated at Gournia, which she
determined to date from the Bronze Age. Funded by the University
of Pennsylvania, Boyd was the first woman to supervise a large field
crew of 100 workers. The report of her findings was published in 1908
(under her married name, Hawes) by the American Exploration Society.
She received an honorary doctorate from Smith College in 1910.
[Source: "Harriet Boyd and the Excavation at Gournia", in Athena Review, Vol.3, no.3, 2003; Shaw, J.W. 1990].
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