Love's Obsession (7 page)

Jim's research plans would not prove easy to realise because he hoped to conduct his own excavations in Turkey, to investigate new sites. Yet he seemed blithely unaware of the necessary formalities. On arrival in Istanbul Jim had met the foreign archaeological community and they were not optimistic. He called on Dr Schede and Kurt Bittel at the German Archaeological Institute. Schede was frankly discouraging, and in his very courteous manner hinted that their mission was foolish. It was quite easy to see sites which were known, but otherwise permits were difficult to get and it had taken Bittel three months to get one! It was impossible to explore without a commissioner, for which the Turkish Government would charge £4 sterling a week plus food and travelling expenses. Bittel suggested that, as they needed to pay for a commissioner in any case, why not make for a known site and dig test pits, or sondages, for a month? They decided to try for a newly looted site at, or near Balekeşir.
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From this distance it seems remarkably naïve that a student could arrive unannounced and expect to conduct excavations in a country he knew nothing about. It is equally mystifying that Cambridge would sponsor such an enterprise.

For much of their time in Turkey Jim was forced to negotiate with the Turkish authorities. He was not good at it. In Istanbul and Ankara he had to deal with savvy politicians and bureaucrats. He spoke little Turkish, a foreigner with no understanding of the complexities of the country. He condemned the military, criticised the incompetence of museum officials and wrote to Alan Wace that, although his departmental contact ‘does try very hard to be scientific … they all have silly ideas in their blood, and no amount of Western teaching will overcome their natural racial pride and stubbornness!
'
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He persevered, railing against the authorities but determined to excavate, finally obtaining a permit to survey sites in the province of Balekeşir, in the northwest of Turkey, east of Çanakkale, where the site of Troy is located. In March he and Eleanor, together with ‘Johnny', the Turkish Government representative, explored the region. Together they walked and drove and rode across the countryside looking for clues to what lay buried beneath.

Though the earth is solid, it is not stationary. Time and insects and the movements of plants and animals grind and turn the soil, and objects long buried sink deeper or move to the surface. Everywhere in the Near East, when you bend to the earth, you find pottery. Broken tiles, rounded bases, sometimes the lip of a cup or a fragment of decoration. You are never alone in this landscape; all around are the stories of people who ate and drank and lived and loved at the very place where you stand. Days or decades or centuries or millennia ago a young woman broke her cooking pot and swept it out the doorway, a farmer dropped his knife on the way home and did not notice it was gone, a child lost her toy as she skipped home. These objects lie there, buried by wind and earth and, like the bones of long dead horses or cows or mammoths, are exposed when wind and water strip the earth away. From these fragments of life's detritus archaeologists imagine stories and try to understand the things that are lost forever—the song the mother sang as she swept the floor, the worry about the failing crops, the childhood game.

Jim was not immune to the romance of either archaeology or of travel. At twenty-three, and in the process of learning archaeology, he fell in love with a place—or was it the other way around? The two loves entwined. The landscapes and local cafes where the villagers brought pots to sell, the joys of riding in the open, of reaching down to find sherds scattered on the ground, the thrill of understanding the way a landscape has formed over time and the knowledge that one is only skimming over the surface. Everyone who loves archaeology comes to love the ground they walk on, to respect it.

Like travellers before and since, Jim tried to describe their exotic life.

Sometimes we would spend a night in a village as the guests of the villagers; at night, after the pilav … had been removed, we would sit on the floor with an ever growing circle of villagers about us, gossiping while the tobacco smoke thickened and the rain beat on the shutters … The talk would be of all things; how to convert a piece of rail into a good knife blade, the prospects of the tobacco crop, the quality of the local wool as compared to the English, what was London like, how far was it to England (How long would it take to go there?), where was Australia, did we find the drinking water here more palatable than in Stambul (where we think in beer, the Turk thinks in water) … With the spring came the flowers, and the storks, whose clamorous bill-clapping made sleep after dawn impossible, and the country became even more attractive: it was satisfying at sunset to see the cattle fording a river on their way back to a village, or to watch water buffalo wallowing in a mud pool; to ride … over the hills and across the valley, to lie beside a spring after lunch high up in the hills and survey the plains spread out like a map below … The friendliness of the people was more marked now that we were known, and when you're coming home dirty from the day's wander it is a pleasure to anticipate a hot bath and to know that your old friend at the eating shop will have put aside some choice kebub (little bits of meat strung on a spit and roasted over an open fire) and a dish of yogurt, however late you may be.
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In fulfilment of his fellowship, Jim sent Alan Wace a report on the Prehistoric Sites in the Balekişir Region. The scholarship was Jim's but the report is in Eleanor's handwriting.

At last Jim found a site that he wanted to excavate, near Babaköy in northwestern Turkey. It was, he claimed, where all the Yortan pots were coming from and he asked Wace if there was any way he could get extra funds to pay excavation costs. Fearing that the Wilkins money would not cover all his expenses, he planned joint excavations with Kurt Bittel. Wace advised Jim to apply for a Sladen scholarship, which he did, although in his application he failed to mention Bittel's involvement in the project, or his determination to excavate with or without funding.
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While waiting to finalise plans, the Stewarts visited Troy where the archaeologist Carl Blegan invited them to stay for a fortnight. The Sladen money came through and after much to-ing and fro-ing Stewart and Bittel began excavations at Babaköy, although Bittel initially refused to acquiesce to what he considered unreasonable Turkish demands. Bittel would do the planning and Jim was happy to learn. Eleanor was the photographer. Work would last only a week and was rushed. On the first day they arrived at three in the afternoon and had begun digging an hour later.
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For only a little over three days Jim, Eleanor and Bittel excavated at different parts of the site but most of the tombs had already been damaged by ploughing or looting. One grave was a double burial. Today—in light of the scientific methods now common and the cultural sensitivities now recognised—it is distressing to read of the extraction of one skeleton: ‘the bones were riddled with fibre and nothing short of a cellulose spray outfit would have got them out; wax was useless and in the end we had to be content with a few long bones and the skull'.
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Jim and Eleanor's photographic catalogue was proving useful. Babaköy did indeed produce Yortan pottery, the distinctive black-slipped and burnished jugs common to Turkish burials and now known to date to the middle of the second millennium BCE. In one grave Jim found a Yortan pot identical in shape and style to a pot he had seen at the Cyprus Museum. The Cyprus pot came from Tomb 39 at Vounous and if the Vounous pot was, as Jim believed, a Yortan import, then this connection could be the key to linking sites in Cyprus and Turkey. This find alone might clarify relative chronologies in the Near East. It might prove the missing link.

After Babaköy Jim and Eleanor spent a further two months excavating at Kusura in Anatolia, with the pioneering female archaeologist Winifred Lamb. In 1936 Winfred Lamb was forty-two and an experienced field archaeologist.
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As a member of the British School at Athens she had excavated at Mycenae, Sparta and in Macedonia and her experience as Honorary Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge extended her interests into later classical periods. Even so, she was a woman and her position at the museum was, and remained, unpaid. She wanted to investigate the connections between the northern Aegean, the Balkans and Anatolia and this led her to excavate the site of Thermi on the island of Lesbos between 1929 and 1933, and to visit Troy where she undertook a broad survey of the prehistoric mounds of the area surrounding the site. Now she was working at Kusura, where a provincial town had thrived on the route between Troy and Smyrna during the fourth millennium BCE.
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Winifred was a friend of Max Mallowan's wife, Agatha Christie, and of the writer Dorothy L. Sayers and tried her hand at crime-writing in a series of light-hearted short stories, including one called The Inspector Interferes, set on an excavation in Turkey. Twenty-four year old John Buchanan from Cambridge and his wife Lucy are probably based on Jim and Eleanor. John is sick in bed and Lucy, ‘a charming lady, oddly enough not as modern in her outlook as one would expect' fusses over him. The Turkish Government representative, the inspector Halil Bey, is murdered—stabbed with a recently excavated bronze pin. Mustafa, a Turkish archaeologist proud of his progressive attitudes, adopts the role of Sherlock Holmes. Suspicion falls on John, whose hostility to the inspector is well known and whose arrogant display of petulance is embarrassing to friends and colleagues alike.

He had been in bed for several days and now wore a Chinese dressing gown over his pyjamas. His face was paler than usual, and there were dark circles round his eyes, for he was still recovering from a bad attack of some kind of fever … ‘I know what you are all thinking', Buchanan exclaimed ‘and I know that I said last night that I would like to kill him. But really I would not be such an ass. It's just the sort of thing the dirty little beast would do, though, to get himself murdered and all of us put in prison just when the dig is half way through …
'
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This was, after an initial surveying year, Lamb's first excavation season at Kusura and digging lasted ten weeks. Jim worked on the cemetery, the results of which he hoped to publish, and maintained a detailed diary and pottery record. He and Eleanor thought Miss Lamb ‘great fun
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and Winifred thought highly of Jim, believing he had ‘the most essential qualification for an archaeologist: a great enthusiasm for his profession'.
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Jim later admitted that she also saw his weaknesses. His worst fault, she warned, was his ‘seeking after perfection', a flaw that, she cautioned, might inhibit him from publishing his ideas.
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Pedantic and demanding with others, in Jim himself this obsession could lead to paralysis.

Another of Jim's ‘faults' emerged twenty years after the 1936 season at Kusura. Winifred Lamb faced a dilemma at the Fitzwilliam Museum when the renowned Turkish archaeologist Dr Halet Çambel was due to visit. Diplomatically, Winifred decided to remove from view the pots from Babaköy that Jim, she was fairly sure, had smuggled out of Turkey without a permit.
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In August of 1936, after a year of travel and archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, Jim and Eleanor boarded a ship at Port Said for their return to England. They looked forward to being back in Park Cottage, but theirs was to be only a temporary return. In the column on the ship's register listing ‘intended future permanent address', they both wrote ‘foreign countries'.
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Jim was determined to return to Cyprus and hoped to excavate at the Bronze Age cemetery of Vounous, in order ‘to test, as far as possible, the connections between Cyprus and Anatolia in the Early Bronze Age'.
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The cemetery was well known to archaeologists and tomb robbers alike and Jim now wrote seeking backing from colleagues, institutions and the all important Archaeological Joint Committee. In his letter of recommendation, Sir John Myers noted Stewart's experience excavating with both Winifred Lamb and Kurt Bittel. Myers wrote formally to the Chief Secretary in Cyprus and informally to Peter Megaw, and gave Jim practical excavation advice and offered to lend him equipment.
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The great Australian prehistorian Gordon Childe was less positive. Although he felt there was a need to investigate the island's prehistory, particularly ‘as Cyprus is still under the heel of British imperialism', he doubted the value of excavating yet more tombs, given the amount of work the Swedes had done. Childe complained bitterly at the failure of excavators to publish, and doubted Jim would get any financial support.
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Jim applied to Peter Megaw for permission to excavate at Vounous near Bellapais. He also asked for ‘free hand to dig test pits or “sondages” at any sites of interest on the North Coast, to be selected later in consultation with yourself, it being understood that the expedition will not consider that such sondages give them any archaeological claim to the site or sites in the future'.
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This was a remarkable request, given that Jim had not yet obtained permission from any landowners and that the law made no distinction between excavation and ‘test' excavations such as he proposed;
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Jim wanted ‘carte blanche' for his activities, free from administrative or bureaucratic restrictions.
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As Megaw pointed out to the Colonial Secretary, Jim Stewart would have quite enough to do getting his excavations of Vounous published, and nothing was to be gained by locating sites if there was no money either to excavate or to protect them from looters.

In the end Jim managed to raise the money. The British School at Athens gave institutional backing but no cash. Actual financial subscribers included the owner of the
Birmingham Post
, Sir Charles Hyde, the businessman, Sir Charles Marston, the Craven Fund of the University of Cambridge, the Australian businessman, W.J. Beasley, Jim's father, A.A. Stewart, and the Sladen Fund of the Linnaean Society of London. There was also an anonymous donor who may well have been Jim himself. Years later he claimed to have spent £1500 of his own money on the work, although the figure may well be a deliberate exaggeration.
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