Evans

On the late morning of Friday the thirteenth of April 1900, on the small Cretan-limestone hill of Kephala four miles south of the modern north-Cretan coastal port of Heraklion, in the second week of the systematic-archaeological-excavation that Sir Arthur Evans, forty-nine years old, the Hemel Hempstead-born British antiquary and Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, had begun on the twenty-third of March 1900 after his five-year purchase of the Kephala site from the Ottoman authorities (the 1894 Ottoman-Cretan land-acquisition arrangement Evans had negotiated through his Cretan-Greek intermediary Iosif Hatzidakis), the Italian senior excavator Federico Halbherr and the British junior excavator Duncan Mackenzie cleared the limestone-rubble fill from the central single inner chamber of the substantial Late-Bronze-Age palatial complex Evans had identified beneath the Kephala hill, exposed the limestone block-and-gypsum-veneer throne, the fresco-decorated antechamber, and the lustral-basin ritual-bath of the Throne Room of Knossos. The Throne Room was the central single archaeological exposure of the Evans Knossos excavation, the foundational moment of the modern field of Aegean Bronze Age archaeology, and the discovery that established the existence of the Minoan civilisation (the name Evans coined the same week from the Greek legend of King Minos of Crete) as a distinct pre-Mycenaean Bronze Age culture of the eastern Mediterranean. The Evans excavation continued at Knossos across the next thirty-one years (the full Knossos publication ran to four volumes between 1921 and 1936), produced the substantial reconstruction of the Palace of Knossos that visitors approach today through the Heraklion tourist circuit, and established the Minoan civilisation as the central single foundational culture of the Aegean Bronze Age sequence on which all subsequent Greek-Bronze-Age scholarship has rested.

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