The University of Minnesota Messenia Expedition (UMME) was an archaeological expedition in Messenia, Greece, conducted between 1953 and 1975. It was devised and begun by William McDonald, who also served as its director for most of its duration. The project had its origins in the decipherment of Linear B in the early 1950s, and the consequent realisation that the Linear B tablets unearthed at the site of Pylos in Messenia – where McDonald had excavated since 1939 – had been the centre of a Mycenaean polity that controlled sites across the region. In the early 1950s, McDonald, soon joined by Richard Hope Simpson, carried out field surveys to match the toponyms given in the Linear B tablets from the Palace of Nestor at Pylos to then-undiscovered archaeological sites in Messenia. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the project expanded to survey 3,800 square kilometres (1,500 sq mi) of territory, gathering records of habitation from the Neolithic to the Medieval periods. The UMME's work established Messenia as one of the best-studied regions of Mycenaean Greece, and has been cited as an inspiration for numerous other archaeological projects in Greece. Its distinctive methods included the involvement of specialists in scientific fields, such as geologists and botanists, as well as its diachronic perspective, including the study of the modern human geography and anthropological investigation as a means of generating hypotheses about the ancient exploitation and habitation of the region. Between 1969 and 1975, the expedition carried out the excavation of Nichoria, a Mycenaean and Early Iron Age site in southern Messenia, which proved a significant source of information about the end of the Bronze Age in Greece, as well as a proving ground and case study for the use of scientific, multi-disciplinary methods in archaeological excavation. Animal bone remains found at the site have become significant in reconstructing the diets of people in Mycenaean and Early Iron Age Greece, and a debated source of evidence for social changes at the end of the Mycenaean period.
Background and rationale
In a later reflection on the project, McDonald stated that the inspiration for the Minnesota Messenia Expedition came in 1953. McDonald had been working on the excavations of the so-called "Palace of Nestor" at Ano Englianos (now known as "Pylos") in Messenia, which had commenced under the joint directorship of the American archaeologist Carl Blegen and Konstantinos Kourouniotis, an archaeologist representing the Greek Archaeological Service, in the spring of 1939. The project at Pylos took on a significant role in the decipherment of Linear B, the writing system used in Mycenaean Greece. On April 3, 1939, the excavation's first trench hit an area later known as the Archives Complex, which contained over 600 tablets and fragments. McDonald, who was supervising the digging, spent several days along with Blegen excavating them by hand, receiving his director's tribute in the excavation write-up for his "circumspection, perseverance and long-suffering in spending so many days on his hands and knees in positions of extreme discomfort." Interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, the excavations resumed in 1952. Kourouniotis had died in 1945, leaving Blegen in sole charge of the excavations: his successor at Archaeological Service, Spyridon Marinatos, focused his efforts primarily on fieldwork in the wider Messenia region. On May 19, 1953, the British scholar Michael Ventris wrote to Blegen, offering a transcription and translation of the Linear B tablet PY Ta 641 found at Pylos the previous year. Ventris' translation of this tablet served as near-conclusive proof that he had correctly deciphered Linear B, that Linear B encoded a form of Greek. In turn, the translation signalled the possibility of reading the archive of Linear B tablets that Blegen, with McDonald's assistance, had begun to unearth at Pylos. The Pylos tablets revealed a large number of toponyms, and gave hints as to the political organisation of the Mycenaean state centred on Pylos – in particular, its organisation into a "Hither Province" and a "Further Province".
Blegen, along with Ventris' collaborator John Chadwick and other scholars, saw the need for a greater understanding of the Mycenaean-era sites and settlements of Messenia, in order to match the toponyms listed in the Linear B tablets with the sites to which they related. While some field survey work had been carried out in Messenia during the first half of the 20th century, the number of known sites was comparatively low, and the quality of survey variable across different parts of the region. In 1935, the German archaeologist Georg Karo had been able to list only twenty-two plausibly dated Mycenaean sites, most of which were in turn derived from the survey conducted by the Swedish Natan Valmin, who had focused his efforts on the Soulima Valley in the north of the region. Other small-scale surveys had taken place in the 1930s and 1940s, principally two investigations by the American Jerome Sperling and the German Ernst Meyer in the north of Messenia, while Blegen had surveyed the region around the Bay of Navarino in early 1939. However, there was little understanding of how settlements had been distributed between these disconnected areas. Blegen therefore suggested that McDonald make a large-scale survey of Messenia, aiming in particular to identify 'towns' contemporary with the Linear B tablets.The British landscape archaeologist John Cherry would later chart another line of inspiration for the UMME in McDonald's interest in the historicity of the Homeric epics, pointing to McDonald's 1942 article 'Where Did Nestor Live?', which attempted to use evidence from the Iliad and Odyssey to argue for the site of Ano Englianos as the home of Homer's Nestor. Indeed, McDonald's later collaborator, Richard Hope Simpson, would publish several works in the same methodological vein, including his Ph.D. thesis and his co-authored 1970 volume The Catalogue of the Ships in Homer's Iliad, both of which attempted to find the archaeological analogues of the toponyms used in the so-called "Catalogue of Ships" in the second book of the Iliad, and the publication of the UMME's findings would include the Trojan War as an historical event on its chronological chart.
The survey project (1953–1968)
McDonald's first surveys (1953–1959)
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