CHAPTER V
“I Really Need a Bit of a Holiday”
In his initial overture to Guy in late December 1926, Breasted said simply, “The task at Megiddo is a large one and I have the feeling that Fisher needs additional help in carrying his responsibility.”1 It is no wonder that Breasted was eager to bring Guy on board, for naming the retiring chief inspector (and acting director) for the Department of Antiquities in British Mandate Palestine as the field director at Megiddo would certainly be seen by many to be a coup.
Guy was a thin, rather wiry, man. He usually parted his hair in the middle and almost always wore spectacles. He also frequently wore a military-style shirt when he wasn’t wearing a jacket and tie, for he had risen to the rank of captain and then lieutenant colonel during the course of his life, having served in both the British and French armies during World War I.2
Born in Scotland in 1885, Guy was forty-two years old at the time that he took over from Fisher at Megiddo. He had attended Oxford University from 1903 to 1906, where he studied classics (Greek and Latin). He then enrolled at Glasgow University from 1906 to 1909, where he studied law. However, he did not receive a degree from either school. His career in field archaeology didn’t begin until after World War I, when he was invited by Sir Leonard Woolley to become the photographer at Carchemish in 1919–20, taking the place of T. E. Lawrence (better known as “Lawrence of Arabia”). He also dug with Woolley at the site of Amarna in Egypt in 1921–22.3
Although he had no formal training in archaeology, and no field experience beyond the seasons spent at Carchemish and Amarna, Guy was subsequently appointed chief inspector for the Department of Antiquities in British Mandate Palestine in 1922. He split his time between Haifa and Jerusalem for the next five years, being responsible primarily for sites in the northern part of the region.4
FIG. 15. P.L.O. Guy, undated photograph (courtesy of Michael Stanner and Jack Green)
During this time, he also met Yemima Ben-Yehuda, whom he fondly referred to as “Jimmie” in his letters. They married in 1925, after the death of her father, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, an extremely well-known scholar responsible for the revival of Hebrew as a spoken modern language. She already had a daughter, Ruth, from a previous marriage; Guy embraced the entire package and treated Ruth as if she were his own daughter. With this union, which brought him into the upper echelons of the Yishuv (the Jewish community), Guy became firmly entrenched in Zionist circles, even though he himself was not Jewish.5
The end for Fisher seems to have come suddenly, with almost no warning. A letter that he sent to the director of antiquities in late March listed the members of the expedition for the coming season, of whom he mentioned only four staff—himself, DeLoach, Lind, and Woodley, since both Stanley and Higgins were now gone—as well as twenty-two Egyptian workmen, most of them from Quft.6 The letters and cables subsequently exchanged right up through 12 April 1927 between Breasted, Fisher, and assorted others also contain absolutely no indication that Guy would replace Fisher as quickly as he did.7
However, one week later, on 19 April, after arriving at Megiddo again a few days earlier and meeting with both of them in person, Breasted sent a letter to Fisher. The next day he sent one to Guy. Breasted explained to Fisher that he would now have a “new advisory directorship of our Oriental Institute work in Palestine” and would thereafter be “Advisory Director” rather than “Field Director” at Megiddo. In the letter to Guy, Breasted stated that he intended to appoint him field director, replacing Fisher, for a term that would begin in just two weeks, on 1 May.8
Although such potential changes had obviously been in the works for some time, it seems likely that what Breasted found when he arrived at Megiddo precipitated the sudden change. “When I reached Megiddo I found Fisher in a very serious condition,” Breasted later wrote. “He was then in the hospital at Haifa having lain unconscious for four hours at our expedition house at Megiddo before he was taken to the hospital.”9
The official reason given for Fisher’s resignation and reassignment was his health. “With the advance of the Spring of 1927, the health of the expedition, including that of Dr. Fisher himself, was in a very precarious state,” Breasted noted in his foreword to Fisher’s preliminary report, which was published in 1929. “He [Fisher] was therefore appointed as advisory director.”10 In his own subsequent preliminary report, published in 1931, Guy similarly stated that “when it had become impossible for Fisher to continue the work that he had begun some eighteen months before, and he had gone to recuperate at Ramallah, Professor Breasted invited me to take charge of the excavations.”11
Fisher’s problems also extended beyond recurring bouts of malaria. Obviously, he had been under a great deal of stress during the 1925–26 season, both in dealing with Higgins and in terms of running the expedition as a whole. This seems to have been more than Fisher had anticipated or could handle. In fact, Breasted said as much to James A. Montgomery, the president of the American Schools of Oriental Research (the entire organization, not simply the archaeological outpost in Jerusalem): “As you know he [Fisher] has always been afflicted with nervous trouble and this has been aggravated by long years of loneliness and exile from America complicated by successive attacks of malaria since his work in Babylonia.… [T]here is no question but that his nervousness has so developed that he suffers from delusions, super-sensitiveness and complexes. He has insisted to me that people were trying to get him out of his post, etc, etc.… Responsible as I was for the future conduct of an elaborate expedition at Megiddo, I could not of course leave him in sole charge of the work.”12
Word that Fisher had been replaced spread quickly throughout the archaeological community in British Mandate Palestine and Egypt. Writing to the University Museum in Philadelphia from Cairo in late April 1927, Alan Rowe, the archaeologist who had previously taken over from Fisher at Beth Shean, said: “I have just heard privately … that Dr. Fisher’s health has given way, and that he has had to give up his work with the Chicago Expedition at Megiddo. His place will be taken by Mr. P.L.O. Guy, at present acting Director of the Department of Antiquities, Jerusalem.”13
It is probably not a coincidence that Fisher had been removed from his directorship of the excavations at Beth Shean in 1923 and from the directorship of the excavations at Megiddo in 1927 for essentially the same physical and mental reasons. In fact, he seems to have had problems while in the field even from the very beginning of his career, for when Fisher was a young architect on his first excavation in 1900, at Nippur in Mesopotamia, he reportedly had “suicidal homosexual yearnings,” as one scholar put it.14 He threatened to kill himself several times in despair over unrequited feelings for his tent mate on the dig, a young British archaeologist named Valentine Geere, whom he had nursed back to health when he fell ill while they were en route to the excavation. As another scholar described it, “the atmosphere at the [Nippur] dig house began to resemble an Edward Albee play.”15
However, Fisher’s feelings might not have been as completely unrequited as they may have seemed to him during those days at Nippur. Geere subsequently published a book entitled By Nile and Euphrates: A Record of Discovery and Adventure, in which the dedication read, “To Clarence S. Fisher as a token of friendship, and of gratitude for the care with which through nine weeks of typhoid fever he nursed The Author.”16
After being appointed field director at Megiddo, Guy directed the expedition for the next seven seasons. During this period, there was a constant stream of personnel problems. Some of these he had inherited from Fisher, but others seem to have been caused by Guy’s unspoken resentment of the more educated scholars whom Breasted simply assigned to his staff and sent from the United States to join the team.17
For example, Breasted now suggested to Guy that a man named John A. Wilson should be assigned to work as a surveyor with DeLoach.18 Wilson would, much later, succeed Breasted as director of the Oriental Institute, but at the time he was a very junior twenty-eight-year-old draftsman and surveyor on Chicago’s Epigraphical Project in Luxor, Egypt. He was also part of a short-lived experiment in which the staff members of the two expeditions (Megiddo and Luxor) each worked at the other project during their respective “off seasons.” He and his wife, Mary, had arrived at Megiddo with Breasted during the latter’s fateful visit in April, following which the change in field directors took place.
For some reason, Guy did not list Wilson among the staff members, or even mention him as a participant, when he published his 1931 preliminary report. However, Wilson is listed in the archival records and in the final publication of these seasons (i.e., the Megiddo I volume) as having participated in the excavations at Megiddo from April through June 1927, so we know that he was present. Moreover, DeLoach himself soon told Breasted that both Mr. and Mrs. Wilson “have been a great help to us.” Mr. Wilson was helping with the registration and surveying, while Mrs. Wilson was helping with the library and generally around the house, as DeLoach put it.19
However, Guy did get along well with the people whom he himself hired. Probably the best example was Guy’s aide-de-camp Ralph B. Parker. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years old at the time that he was hired at Megiddo, Parker was a military man who went by “Harry” for reasons now unknown. He had served in the Army Cyclist Corps and the Sixteenth Welsh Regiment during World War I. On a 1926 ship manifest, while journeying from Australia to England, he listed his profession as “police man” and his place of residence as “Palestine,” for he was serving as an officer in the “British Gendarmerie” at the time. Winston Churchill had created the unit back in 1922, to serve as a paramilitary force in British Mandate Palestine.20
Guy hired Parker in June 1927, after getting a recommendation from General MacNeill, Parker’s commanding officer, when the unit was being disbanded. Guy gave Parker the responsibility of maintaining order in the dig house and other general duties. Though he had taken part in a small excavation at a crusader castle before coming to Megiddo, Parker was never again active in the field, and Guy himself said that Parker would never be an archaeologist.21 Nonetheless, he ended up serving at Megiddo longer than any other staff member—not only right through the final season in 1939, but even thereafter, for he stayed on to oversee and take care of the dig house and the site through World War II, the 1948 War of Independence, and beyond, until 1954 when he finally retired to Cyprus (and then to London by 1957).22
Parker’s hire was not without some bumps, however. For example, DeLoach complained to Breasted in late May, before Parker’s arrival, that Parker “has had no university training along such lines,” and that it seemed a waste of money to put him on staff.23 A month later, after Parker had arrived toward the end of June, DeLoach changed his tune somewhat, noting that Parker was “a very jovial sort of a chap.” But, he also added, “I don’t believe I ever saw a person who hated the Jews more, much to our (including the Guy’s [sic]) surprise.”24
In early June, even before Parker arrived, DeLoach reported to Breasted that there were already tensions at the dig. “The Jewish question is getting to be a problem with us,” he wrote, “and we can’t say much about it without running the danger of offending Mrs. Guy. We have Jewish carpenters, last week we had a Russian Jewess with us studying pottery, and Mr. Guy is getting a Jewish assistant for me. The men are dissatisfied with it as much or more than we are. Reis Hamid came in to me last night and said that the men were working for me, and not for Mr. Guy, for he is “half Jewish himself now.” ”25
The ongoing situation in British Mandate Palestine was clearly reflected at the dig. It had been only ten years since the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. During that decade, tensions ran high between Arabs and Jews in the region, including riots in 1920 and 1921, as mentioned. Although the situation was only going to get worse during the remaining years that the Chicago excavators were at Megiddo, at this point they had no way of knowing any of that, for the August 1929 Arab riots were still two years off, the general strike of 1933 and the Arab Revolt of 1936–39 were even further away, and World War II was only a glimmer on the horizon.
Within a few days of taking over and beginning to dig in early May, Guy found himself faced by a number of problems. Some were ongoing and some beyond his control, but in others he seems to have played a large role. One problem, which should have been anticipated since the swamps had not yet been fully drained, was malaria, which continued to plague the staff.26
In his autobiography, published in 1972, Wilson recalled the situation as follows:
At the end of the 1927 season at Luxor, I had gone to Megiddo in Palestine, to spend a few weeks learning about excavation. When Mary and I had arrived, we found that there was not a Western man left at the mound. Malaria had ravaged the staff. Fortunately, the work had been well organized, and the mound was marked with a grid of squares for precise location. For two weeks I kept the workmen digging away at the same level. I supervised the moving of earth and listened solemnly to the report of the foreman, of which I understood only about half. At the end of a day, I labeled the baskets of finds by square and level and took them into the house for the woman registrar to catalogue. By the time the staff had been reorganized, the new director [Guy] was too busy learning his mound to bother about teaching me. So I ran a dig briefly without knowing the principles and detailed techniques of excavations.27
Wilson also noted elsewhere that it took them fully four hours to drive the fifteen miles from Haifa to Megiddo because of the state of the roads at that time. Once they were at the site, he and his wife dosed themselves with quinine until their ears rang, as he put it, in order to avoid coming down with malaria themselves. When in their room at the dig house, they also suffered from the intense heat, which reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit at one point, because of the corrugated iron roof on the building. “I never did learn field archaeology,” he later said, “except by the experience of being pitched into it head first.”28
Another immediate setback impacted Breasted’s offer to increase the number of workmen, for some of the Egyptian foremen demanded higher wages at the first opportunity. Instead of agreeing to their request, Guy simply let them go, with Breasted’s evident approval.29
Then J. G. O’Neill arrived at the dig. He was on a traveling fellowship from the University of Dublin in Ireland, where he was a student of R.A.S. Macalister—the same Macalister who had excavated at Gezer twenty years earlier. However, he left in indignation less than a month into the season, after having been chastised by Guy for a variety of unstated missteps. In retaliation, O’Neill sent a letter to Guy from Jerusalem during the first days of June that contained statements no student or subordinate should ever send to the field director of an excavation, including one that read, “I knew that you were a mere substitute during Dr. Fisher’s unfortunate absence.”30 This, of course, was far from the truth, since Guy had just been appointed permanent field director in Fisher’s place.
It was only much later, in August, that Guy finally brought the subject up with Breasted, noting simply that “O’Neill turned out to be a most objectionable person, who irritated everybody.” He followed this up with more details in late September, after which Breasted expressed regret that Guy had been forced to deal with such unpleasantness and that “the O’Neill experiment turned out so unsuccessfully.”31 It was the second such failed experiment in as many years: first Higgins and now O’Neill. It would not be the last.
At the same time that all of this was going on, William F. Badè reported to Breasted that there were unsubstantiated rumors about “goings-on” at Megiddo. Badè was a professor at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. He is perhaps better known to the general public as the literary executor and biographer of the naturalist John Muir, and as a former president of the Sierra Club and editor of the Sierra Club Bulletin.32 Badè was also an archaeologist, however, and at the time he was directing the excavations at Tell en-Nasbeh, an Iron Age site near Jerusalem, which may have been biblical Mizpah. A year earlier, Higgins had been working for him on the side, without receiving prior permission from Breasted, so Badè had had inside information about Megiddo at the time, and still had his ear to the ground in terms of gossip and “goings-on” in the general archaeological community.33
He told Breasted that he was a “disinterested source,” noting, “What has happened or is now happening at Megiddo is, of course, not my affair. But I naturally have a friendly interest in the success of the Expedition.” However, it was clearly more than just a “friendly interest,” and Badè may not have been as disinterested as he claimed, because he seems to have taken a certain amount of glee in reporting the rumors to Breasted.34
According to Badè, one archaeologist told him that “the best interests of the Megiddo Expedition have unwittingly been sacrificed to the intrigues of a middle-aged stenographer, infatuated with a young man who is himself ill and apparently completely under her influence.”35 While the stenographer was quite obviously none other than Miss Woodley, it is less clear who the specific young man was, though it was most likely DeLoach or, less likely, O’Neill.
In fact, it may well have been O’Neill who was the archaeologist quoted by Badè and who was the source for these rumors. To be fair, though, these could just have easily been told to Badè by Fisher himself, because Fisher had already cabled Breasted near the end of May, about the time that O’Neill was let go. He claimed that the doctors in Beirut had now given him a clean bill of health and reported: “CONDITIONS AT MEGIDDO VERY UNSATISFACTORY WOULD SUGGEST MY TAKING CHARGE TO SAVE SITUATION.” To this, Breasted simply cabled back the same day, “REGRET SUGGESTION IMPOSSIBLE.”36
Badè further informed Breasted that the archaeological material on the tell at Megiddo was not being competently excavated, because Guy was there only part of the time. Furthermore, the stenographer—that is, Miss Woodley—was busy getting rid of everyone whom she disliked on the dig by reporting “alleged incivilities” to either Guy or DeLoach. He concluded by saying, “Meanwhile the field observations and the archaeological records of the mound are getting disrupted at a most critical and important stage of the dig,” and asserted that “Dr. Fisher stands ready to save the situation as much as he can.”37
In addition, a few weeks later, Breasted received in the mail an anonymous handwritten letter signed only “An Observer.” It read in part: “You should be advised that a scandal is brewing at Megiddo and that the scientific part of the work is so badly done that the excavations should be closed under the rules of the Department of Antiquities. Mr. Guy is ill and has not been at the mound for two weeks or more. Meanwhile the messing-up continues. You should also inquire into the respectability of one of the persons whom you have left in charge.”38 It is unclear who sent this anonymous letter, though it was most likely O’Neill, Badè, or Fisher.
This is hardly the sort of situation that a new field director wishes to face, especially if it is the previous field director who may have played a part in the machinations. To his credit, Breasted backed Guy fully. In mid-June, he wrote to say that he understood Guy had been “confronted with such an exodus of the native staff but this is simply a continuation of the situation which was obviously impending before I left the place. I am sure that you will be able to consolidate the organization and build it up again.”39 In a separate and confidential letter, he also advised Guy of the rumors that had reached his ears via Badè and the anonymous source, and suggested that they would be put to rest if Mrs. Guy could begin living in the Megiddo house as soon as possible.40
Breasted also sent a polite response to Badè, in which he noted that many of the problems had been caused by “the unexpected delay in the release of Mr. Guy from his duties in Jerusalem.”41 This was, in fact, a very real problem because the British authorities were having difficulty finding someone to replace Guy as director of antiquities in British Mandate Palestine and had therefore kept him on in the position of acting director long after his originally scheduled resignation date. This, in turn, meant that Guy could be at Megiddo only on a part-time basis, until the situation was finally resolved in late August.
Guy himself said that each week he spent three days in Jerusalem and three days at Megiddo, with a day taken up traveling between the two. As he put it, in a rather understated manner several years later, the four months that followed his arrival at Megiddo on 30 April 1927 “were somewhat strenuous.”42
In the meantime, DeLoach and Breasted had also been discussing “the inability of the London government to find the right man as Director for the Palestine Department of Antiquities,” which Breasted described as being “a great misfortune for us.”43 Since DeLoach had been doing a good job overseeing operations on the top of the mound during this period, Breasted promoted him to the position of assistant field director in late June. Not only was this a recognition of the good work that he was doing; it was also done, as Breasted told Guy, so that the work at Megiddo would not be seen by outsiders as being “in the casual control of a member of the expedition without defined powers.”44
Eventually, in mid-July, Guy attempted to counter the rumors, informing Breasted that Mrs. Guy had accompanied him every time he went to Megiddo. Moreover, she would now be there with him continuously, which should help put the rumors completely to rest. He also added that they had both been absent for much of June, because of sandfly fever, a fact that DeLoach separately confirmed, and that he believed the rumors and reports were being spread by Fisher, “whose behavior even towards myself is odd.”45
DeLoach also chimed in at about the same time, confirming that things were now more peaceful at the dig. Mrs. Guy was there full-time, working on translating one of Breasted’s books into Hebrew and trying to learn Egyptian hieroglyphics. She and Mr. Guy had their own living room, DeLoach said, and the dig house was nearly complete, with only the large roof still remaining to be installed. Miss Woodley had also planted flowers and lawn seed in front of the entrances, which eased the stress among the personnel.46
On 11 July, a large earthquake hit Jericho, Nablus, and other nearby communities, causing severe damage and the loss of many lives. However, it was barely felt at Megiddo. DeLoach immediately sent a cable to Breasted the next day, informing him that everyone on the team was okay; the only damage they had suffered was to two dozen pots that fell off a shelf in the storeroom. Others, including Lind, later said the same.47
However, the attempted sabotage, or perhaps it was more like unintended consequences, continued, for Guy received a cable from Breasted in early August that read, “SURPRISED HEAR FROM SEVERAL SOURCES MEGIDDO WORK STOPPED PLEASE CABLE REASONS AND DATE OF RESUMPTION.” To this, Guy could only reply, probably quite bewildered, “CANNOT UNDERSTAND WORK HAS CONTINUED AND IS CONTINUING WITHOUT INTERRUPTION.”48
The matter was quickly resolved, with Breasted attributing it to erroneous reports brought back by “passing travelers,” but one wonders who the real sources were, which he never mentioned. It may have been as simple as a complaint in a letter sent by DeLoach to Breasted in mid-July, which began, “Mr. Guy has stopped all of the work on the Tell before I left [for a medical appointment in Beirut] … which was extremely disappointing to me.” DeLoach did not specify why the work was temporarily stopped, but went on to say that it was discouraging to him personally, for some reason, and also not what Breasted would have wanted.49
Furthermore, DeLoach also said that Parker was causing problems at the dig, including cursing at the workmen and even kicking a little boy to the ground. As DeLoach put it, “Such a thing as this might be all right in the famous Irish [sic: Welsh] regiment, of which he was a member, but I think that is very unbecoming to an expedition such as ours.” On a different matter altogether, DeLoach also noted that he was training the Russian chauffeur, Serge Tchoub (who had taken the position after Stanley Fisher returned home to the United States), to help him do the mapping and measuring for the survey and plans. “He is very bright and seems willing to learn,” said DeLoach, adding also, “This way we save a salary.”50
During the first week of August, Parker’s treatment of the workmen and locals worsened. In particular, there was an incident one evening when Parker “kicked one of the locals on the shin just below the knee, causing a bad injury,” according to DeLoach. Miss Woodley bandaged the wound up immediately and the man was able to hobble around using a stick, but the workmen, including those who came from the two villages nearest to the expedition, went on strike in protest. DeLoach and Lind were eventually able to get Parker to apologize to some extent, and they then cajoled everyone into going back to work, but, as DeLoach put it, “the locals are very much upset.”51
DeLoach, who had by now become Breasted’s inside source on the dig (like Kellogg the year before), tended to send more details of the sordid underbelly of the excavation than he did news of the exciting discoveries. He did this deliberately, saying, “I am including a great many details which may not amount to very much in themselves, but I have found, during the last two years, most of the big things that affect the destiny of an expedition grow up from the small ones, and that if these small ones can be settled in time, a great deal of time and trouble may be saved later. I do not like to be always complaining and finding fault, but I think that you want to know all these things if they are really going on.”52
DeLoach was correct on both counts, for such minor incidents can grow to be big problems even on excavations today, and Breasted surely needed an ear to the ground, especially on a dig that had already seen more than its share of personal squabbles and personnel problems. However, if his letters of mid-July and early August were what caused Breasted to send the cable to Guy, asking why reports of the dig shutting down early had reached his ears, then DeLoach himself may have unintentionally contributed to some of the ongoing problems.
Eventually, in late August, Ernest Richmond was appointed director of antiquities, a position that he held for the next decade, through 1937. Guy could finally begin working at Megiddo full-time, although the dig lasted only another month that year before they closed up at the end of September.53
Just after the season ended, Badè apologized to Guy and, de facto, to Breasted. He retracted the rumors he had conveyed and the statements he had made earlier, saying to Guy, “You have had a very difficult task to administer the Department of Antiquities and the affairs of the Megiddo Expedition at the same time, and I have only admiration for the ability with which you have done it.”54
Charles Breasted, executive director of the Oriental Institute and elder son of James Henry Breasted, who would be an integral part of the Megiddo story from then on, noted that, even back in Chicago, they realized “this has been an exceptionally trying time in Palestine.”55 It was probably with a tremendous feeling of relief, therefore, that Guy sent DeLoach, Lind, and Woodley off on holiday first and then on to Luxor in Egypt, where they were to work on Chicago’s dig there for the winter. He and his wife, Yemima, then left for Europe, to take a vacation that they both desperately needed. As he put it, “I really need a bit of a holiday.”56
However, just as soon as they got back from their vacation, Breasted began to ramp up the pressure once more. In early January 1928, he told Guy, “This coming season, beginning next April, is one of vital importance for the future of our work … and I am looking to you to put through a vigorous and aggressive season’s work.” Breasted had specific interests in mind, of course, for he also wanted Guy to get down into the levels of the mound that would yield the Egyptian and Solomonic monuments for which he had been waiting with ever-growing impatience and frustration.57
The season ultimately proved to be successful in terms of personnel as well, but in an unexpected way. Since Higgins had been let go at the end of the 1926 season, DeLoach had served as their surveyor during the 1927 season, as well as acting as temporary assistant field director for part of that time, as mentioned. However, in early 1928, DeLoach was ordered by his doctors to remain in Chicago for health reasons, since he continued to suffer from malaria.58
It was clear that the team needed to hire an experienced surveyor for the season, which was scheduled to begin in early May and last through the end of July. It was a good thing that they did, for DeLoach was not cleared by the doctors to return to Megiddo until September.
At first, they tried to hire a surveyor named Ivan Terentieff, who was working on a University of Michigan expedition at Karanis (Kôm Aushim) in Egypt, but it turned out that he would not be available until early June. In the interim, therefore, Guy hired a young Ukrainian-born architect named Emmanuel Wilensky, who was passionate about archaeology. He was twenty-five years old and had already been working on a Harvard University excavation at the site of Nuzi in Iraq.59 Wilensky arrived at Megiddo in late April, just before the season began.
Although he was sick for much of the time, because of some bad fish that he had eaten, Wilensky performed his job quietly and professionally. He worked with the team until early June, at which point Terentieff arrived and took over for the rest of the season and beyond (until the end of September).60 As a result, Wilensky was a known quantity; he would return to the expedition a few years later, in 1932 and 1933, as we shall see.
Other new members also joined the team in 1928, including Charles Little, who had previously worked at Beth Shean as a draftsman, and whose family ran a hotel up in Lebanon. Like Wilensky, Little was frequently ill during the season, but in Little’s case the malady was heart trouble that was thought to have been caused by his excessive smoking—up to forty cigarettes and ten pipes a day, according to one eyewitness. He arrived at Megiddo by mid-April and barely made it through the season, resigning and leaving on the last day of July. Guy was not impressed by him, remarking, “I have not observed that he takes much interest in his work, which, I am inclined to think, he regards as a task to be got through, and not something to be done con amore.” He added that he eventually found out that Rowe had fired Little, which is why he had left Beth Shean; it is a wonder that he was ever even hired at Megiddo.61
But it was two other young men who arrived that year, one before the season and one after, who would prove to be essential to the expedition and its publications, although nobody could have predicted that at the time. One was Geoffrey M. Shipton, the seventeen-year-old nephew of Harry Parker, Guy’s aide-de-camp. Shipton, who went by “Geoff,” was a high school dropout from Wales. He initially joined the project in mid-January 1928, before the season began, in large part to keep Parker company and to give Shipton himself something to do. A visitor to Megiddo described him a few years later as “a boy in his teens … without any college education and of course lacking all scientific background.”62
Shipton had no training in archaeology whatsoever and was originally hired for only three months as a draftsman with a salary of $75. He ended up being one of the longest-serving members of the expedition, from 1928 right up through the final field season in 1939. He learned everything on-site at Megiddo, having been repeatedly denied admission to study at Chicago, despite the best efforts of the others on the team.63 He finally left the expedition as it came to an end, when he got a job offer that he couldn’t refuse and went to work for a company called Spinney’s, which based him in Haifa and Cyprus.64
The other fortuitous hire that year was Robert Scott Lamon, a six-foot-tall, twenty-two-year-old geology student and member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity from the University of Chicago, who had decided to take a break from his undergraduate studies. He was “on the slim side, good looking, and comes of excellent family,” as Charles Breasted noted in a letter of introduction sent to Guy in late August 1928. However, he had also never before been outside the United States and had never participated in an archaeological excavation.65
Lamon was sent over in September 1928, in time for the fall season, to serve double duty—as a surveyor in place of Terentieff and as a draftsman in place of Little, both of whom had just left at that point. Lamon ended up serving the expedition almost as long as Shipton, including temporarily serving as the field director after Guy was fired in 1934. His last season in the field was in 1935–36, after which he returned to Chicago to work on the publications. He later became a petroleum geologist working for Standard Oil, Northern Natural Gas, and other companies in Calgary, Canada, and Bogota, Colombia, before retiring to Arizona, where he passed away in 1975.66
Between the two of them, Lamon and Shipton eventually wrote or coauthored five of the publications associated with the results of the project, which is the same number as the three field directors (Fisher, Guy, and Loud) combined. Perhaps surprisingly, especially given their initial lack of archaeological training, Lamon and Shipton’s publications included two books on the pottery found at the site, a book on the water tunnel system, a guidebook, and—most importantly—the Megiddo I volume.67 The fact that such young, junior, and initially untrained and inexperienced members of the staff ended up being entrusted with and responsible for the final publication of the ten field seasons directed by Fisher and Guy—that is, all of the Chicago seasons except for those directed by Loud from 1935 to 1939—is interesting, if not downright shocking.
FIG. 16. Megiddo excavation staff and spouses, 7 September 1928; front row, sitting (left to right): William Staples, Yemima Guy, P.L.O. Guy (with dog), Margaret Staples, Ivan Terentieff; back row, standing (left to right): Harry Parker, Edward DeLoach, Olof Lind, Robert Lamon, Geoffrey Shipton (courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago)
They were not the only newcomers that season either, for on the same boat as Lamon, and beginning work on the same day in late September, came William E. Staples, who had been hired by Breasted and sent over to serve as epigrapher and recorder for the expedition. Described by Charles Breasted as “a man of great ability, likable personality, and great industry,” Staples was Canadian, a graduate of Victoria College and the University of Toronto. He had recently married, in 1926, and his wife, Margaret Ruth (who was known simply as “Ruth” to her friends), came with him to Megiddo, beginning a trend of married couples living in the dig house.68
Guy eventually suggested to Breasted that a permanent team should be based at Megiddo all year round, if they were to properly deal with all of the material that was coming out of the ground. Thus, rather than having the team members present just during the digging season and only a skeleton crew left during the other months of the year, he wanted team members to be available for a full twelve months, with as little change in personnel as possible, so that the registration, drawing, photography, and planning could be kept up to date at all times.69
He made this plea because of the experiment that had been put in place the previous year, when—as mentioned above—some of the Megiddo staff members had been sent to the Chicago dig at Luxor in Egypt after the season at Megiddo had ended. The experiment had not been successful and so Breasted agreed entirely with Guy’s logic, though he pointed out that they should also give the team members a reasonable vacation period each year.70
By this time, Guy also had very firm ideas about the personnel, and about their personalities. He very much liked Olof Lind, whom he described as a first-class photographer who did his work just as Guy would have done, recalling his days as Woolley’s photographer at Carchemish early in his career. He also noted that Lind was loyal and pleasant, and got along well with the others.71
In contrast, he described Miss Woodley, who was by then the registrar, as rather odd and quite devious. Not only did she have too much to look after, according to Guy, but she was very protective of her role on the dig, to the extent that she made things difficult for others by not allowing them to help out even when they offered to undertake chores that remained undone. Even more disgraceful, in his eyes, was that “she cannot draw at all, and does not even check properly.… When a mistake is found, she will never admit that it is her fault.”72
Guy also itemized some of the problems that Miss Woodley was causing among the other staff members, including possibly making advances on DeLoach, Shipton, and Little, one after the other. “Now Miss Woodley has dropped Shipton and rather nags at him,” he wrote. “She has, however, taken up Little and coddles him as she used to want to coddle DeLoach.”73 Those three were the only single and available men at the dig during the spring of 1928. Miss Woodley would have been thirty-seven years old at the time, while Shipton was twenty years her junior, still being only seventeen or eighteen. DeLoach would have been about twenty-seven, just ten years younger than Miss Woodley, while it is unclear how old Little was. It is perhaps also appropriate to recall that, exactly one year earlier, Badè had specifically warned Breasted about “the intrigues of a middle-aged stenographer, infatuated with a young man who is himself ill and apparently completely under her influence”—that young man was most likely DeLoach, as mentioned just a few pages ago.74
Guy ended his comments by saying that Miss Woodley “has a character which makes her an extremely dangerous member of my staff.” He refused to go into further specifics, but rather mysteriously remarked only that there were “many little things, difficult to take hold of, which … combine to make a story of intrigue, hintings and devious dealing which causes me to tell you that I do not want Miss Woodley to remain at Megiddo any longer than can be helped.”75
In the end, it is perhaps not surprising that Miss Woodley was let go after the season was over, in August 1928, almost exactly two years since Fisher first hired her. Reaction had been quick, for her severance came just two months after Guy complained to Breasted about her.76
She landed on her feet soon enough, although this outcome entailed a move westward to Greece. She began working in 1932, at first part-time, as the secretary of the British School of Archaeology in Athens, just as she had previously been the secretary of the British School in Jerusalem before being hired at Megiddo. She was eventually hired full-time and served in that position for more than a decade, from 1936 to 1946, after which she retired to Leeds.77
Meanwhile Guy was still also having problems with Fisher, who was living not too far away, in Ramallah. The two men had a strained relationship, with each complaining to Breasted about the other.78 In late June, for example, Guy told Breasted: “I feel that Fisher has behaved very discourteously … apart from discourtesy when we have met, he has completely ignored letters of mine to which no-one could take exception.… Also, he seems to lose no opportunity of speaking ill of us here.” He concluded: “So far as I can hear and see, Fisher has shown himself to be a trouble-maker wherever he has gone: with Hilprecht, with Reisner, at Beisan [Beth Shean], and certainly with us. He is not clean, and I earnestly hope that you will sever his connexion with Megiddo.”79
He further besmirched Fisher by referring to an unspecified incident that they had apparently managed to keep quiet. “If it were made public,” Guy claimed, it “would … have the most serious results for Fisher himself.” He reassured Breasted, however, that “though people have mentioned the thing to me, I have spoken of it to nobody except Pere Vincent [from the École Biblique in Jerusalem].… He told me that he was thinking of recommending Fisher as head of the Baghdad School; would I tell him, frankly and freely, what I thought of the idea? I thought of what had happened here, and what might so easily happen there if Fisher were put in charge of young men, and I could do no other than advise against it, giving the reasons why I did so.”80
What had happened at Megiddo? Unfortunately, we simply don’t know. Guy never did elaborate upon what had happened and why he was concerned about the problems that might ensue if Fisher were placed in charge of young men. There is nothing else in the archives at the Oriental Institute about this supposed episode. However, given what we know about Fisher’s previous unrequited love for his tent mate at Nippur, as well as about a young boy named Nasir el-Hussein whom he brought home to America from that dig (but who returned to his own home shortly thereafter),81 plus an adopted son from Ramallah named David (or, rather, Daoud), and a school for young boys in Jerusalem with which he was associated, it is probably safe to say that the unspecified incident did not involve a tryst with Miss Woodley. Regardless of what Fisher may or may not have done, this pattern of using innuendo and gossip against colleagues and fellow team members, even if founded in truth, would not serve Guy well in the coming years, and it eventually got him fired in 1934.
There is one additional strange mention in a very long and detailed letter that Guy sent to Breasted in late June. He wrote rather enigmatically about an attack that had been made on Parker and Shipton, remarking only that an investigation into it had closed satisfactorily, with the perpetrators being let off with a warning after apologizing for what they had done.82 As with the unspecified incident with Fisher that Guy had mentioned, there is no other discussion anywhere else in the archives of this episode involving Parker and Shipton. Thus it is unclear what might have happened or why, though perhaps the matter can be traced back to the previous year, in July and August 1927, when DeLoach detailed Parker’s abusive treatment of the local workmen and the abortive strike that resulted when he physically attacked one of them.83 Perhaps further information will turn up in the future, but for now all that can be said is that relations between the Megiddo staff and the nearby villagers apparently were not always courteous and friendly during these years.
In fact, regarding such relations with the locals, something else that Guy accidentally discovered at about the same time is of supreme importance. Realizing that the three-year lease on the land at Megiddo that Fisher had originally negotiated back in 1925 was going to expire in October, Guy wrote to Breasted during the summer, listing four potential courses of action regarding future work at the mound, three of which required renewing the lease. The fourth involved purchasing, rather than renting, a specific area of the mound.84
He had already made inquiries at the Department of Antiquities about what could be done, and had been told that, if they were willing to pay for it, the land could be expropriated and would become government property, which they could then excavate at their leisure. Guy thought this might be something worth investigating. As it turned out, it was.85
Less than two weeks later, matters played straight into Guy’s hands. When he mentioned to the other staff members that the lease that Fisher had previously signed with the local landowners was due to expire soon, Miss Woodley, who was friends with a British expatriate living in Haifa named Miss Frances E. Newton, passed along the surprising information that Megiddo did not legally belong to the people to whom they had been paying rent for the past three years. She also said that Miss Newton had told Fisher the same thing back when he had signed the original lease in 1925, but that he hadn’t paid attention.86
Fisher should have listened to her, for it turned out that almost 20 percent of the mound—thirteen acres—was actually owned by an American named Mrs. Rosamond Dale Owen Oliphant Templeton. She was the granddaughter of Robert Owen, who had founded a well-known but ultimately failed utopian community at New Harmony in Indiana. She was also the second wife and widow of Laurence Oliphant, a popular Scottish novelist and travel writer who had lived next door to Gottlieb Schumacher in Haifa from 1882 to 1888.87
Laurence met and married Rosamond a little more than two years after his first wife died suddenly. However, just six months after their wedding, he passed away in turn, succumbing to lung cancer in late December 1888. Rosamond then spent the next few decades sorting out his affairs, including dealing with land that he had purchased in Ottoman Palestine. She also married a disciple of Oliphant’s named James Templeton, only to have him commit suicide within two years by jumping overboard while sailing back from Beirut to Haifa. The only thing she retained from that marriage was her new name, Mrs. Templeton, by which she was known for the rest of her life.88
As a result of her marriage to Laurence Oliphant, Mrs. Templeton inherited more than just Tell el-Mutesellim. According to the New York Times, her overall holdings in the Jezreel Valley were extensive.89 In fact, when Schumacher began his excavations at the site in 1903, several newspaper articles appeared in British newspapers that same year, describing her as the “owner of a portion of the plain of Armageddon.” The Edinburgh Evening News even ran the story with the headline “English Lady Owns Armageddon.” One British newspaper reporter asked, “How much of Armageddon do you own, Mrs. Templeton?” to which she replied, “About 1200 acres, and it is the central and best part.”90 However, two different tales, which she told at different times, emerged as to how she had acquired the land in the first place.
According to the earlier version, Laurence Oliphant became the owner of the property in the Jezreel Valley somewhat by accident in 1884 or 1885.91 In a detailed letter that he published about Armageddon in the New York Sun, dated 11 September 1884, Oliphant said that the villagers who owned the land on and around Lejjun and Tell el-Mutesellim were in a tremendous amount of debt and had begged him for loans, which he said he was unable to provide. It is possible, though, that he did eventually take out mortgages on this land in return for loaning them money after all, and when the owners defaulted on their payments, the land became his.92
In fact, when Mrs. Templeton was interviewed by the reporter in London in 1903, she told him that Laurence had acquired the land in the Jezreel Valley and Haifa back in the 1880s. However, as she said, “Mr. Oliphant bought the land, but Europeans were not allowed at that time to have land in their names, so he held it in the name of an Arab.”93
She said further that she had tried to secure it in her own name but was unsuccessful for fifteen years. At last, she prevailed; it was at that point that she told the reporter that she owned twelve hundred acres of Armageddon, complete with documentation and a valid title to back up her claim.94
However, in her book My Perilous Life in Palestine, which she published in 1929, the story did not end in 1903 but continued for nearly three more decades.95 In that book, she also told an entirely different tale of her acquisition of Armageddon. There she wrote that, sometime during the 1890s, the Turkish government had put Armageddon up for auction to the highest bidder. She said that she was guided by her inner voice, to which she had listened her whole life, to purchase the famous site. Moreover, as she noted, the local landowners were the ones who had told the government to sell the land, and she had been asked by the government to buy it, so she wouldn’t be robbing anyone if she bought the thousand acres of land that were being offered to her.96
She repeated the same story in a letter that she sent to the commissioner of lands in British Mandate Palestine, a copy of which she eventually sent to Guy. In it, she said, “I bought the land put up at auction by the Turkish Government at the earnest request of the fellaheen in order to assist them, as they badly needed the money being much in debt.”97
In her own book, published in 1948, Miss Newton confirmed this version of the story, writing that “more than half a century ago the widow of Lawrence [sic] Oliphant bought a share in the ‘Armageddon’ land when the Turks put it up to auction to recover taxes due from the peasants. Her name appears in the Turkish Land Registry books as part-owner.”98
After doing some research, Guy concluded that it did seem very likely that the people to whom they had been paying rent since 1925 had no right to the money—at least not without Mrs. Templeton’s consent. He also said that he couldn’t understand why a search of the Land Registry had not been done when they had signed the original lease, especially since Miss Newton had told Fisher about Mrs. Templeton at the time. It seemed obvious to Guy that Fisher, and the small committee that had been formed at the time, had simply ignored what Miss Newton had said.
Guy outlined to Breasted why the new situation might be turned to their advantage, for they would be able to overturn their current lease, including the part about handing over the dig house, and could negotiate new terms with the proper owner, that is, Mrs. Templeton. He also suggested that Breasted should meet with Mrs. Templeton, because she might be willing to sell everything to them at a good price.
A visit was indeed made to Mrs. Templeton, but it was Guy who went to meet her, rather than Breasted. In early September, Guy related to Breasted what had transpired. “I duly visited Mrs. Templeton at 201 Brighton Road, Worthing. She is 82, but her faculties are still acute. She is … keenly interested in some kind of Christianity which she herself describes as ‘unorthodox’, and which aims at closer brotherhood among mankind, and higher uplift.”99
She was eager to sell the land to them, Guy said, but first she had to definitively establish her title to it. He also reported that she was very interested in their work at Megiddo and wouldn’t put any obstacles in their way, in terms of selling the land to them. He ended by saying: “I am glad I called upon her: it lets us know how things lie. She is a pleasant old lady, and we got on famously together … although she only eats two meals a day, breakfast and supper, she had prepared various little cakes and things for my delectation.”100
He subsequently sent a cable to Breasted in late September, in which he wrote that the British Mandate government was prepared to expropriate the land, as long as the Oriental Institute was willing to pay for it: “GOVERNMENT WROTE YOU TWENTYFIFTH PREPARED TO EXPROPRIATE AT OUR EXPENSE TITLE TO VEST IN THEM STOP I BELIEVE THIS BEST COURSE IRRESPECTIVE OF PRESENT OWNERSHIP STOP PROBABLE COST UNDER 3750 DOLLARS. PLEASE CABLE DECISION.”101
Breasted’s return cable said simply, “THIS AUTHORIZES AGREEMENT WITH GOVERNMENT FOR EXPROPRIATION AND PURCHASE ON TERMS CABLED ME.” He also asked Guy to let him know when the government had proceeded with the expropriation of the land, so that they could pay the bill.102
Finally, at the beginning of November, Guy was able to tell Breasted that the expropriation of the land was going forward, but very slowly. The area had been officially surveyed, all boxes on the various forms had been duly checked, and notice was about to be served to the local owners. He ended on the hopeful note that he expected to gain entry to the whole area in about a week.103
As it transpired, however, the process of expropriation was not well received by the local landowners or the villagers who were farming the land, which might have been expected. Nevertheless, it had been made quite clear to them that the expropriation would take place, regardless of their feelings. The final word was given to Hassan Saad, the representative of the local landowners, on 12 November.
The next morning, when Guy and the other team members climbed to the top of the tell to begin work, they found that “malicious damage” had been done to their equipment during the night. One of the railway cars for transporting the dirt had been pushed down an embankment; the field telephone was knocked over and broken; a water jar was smashed; a box was taken from one of the tents and thrown into Schumacher’s Great Trench; and “an unpleasant and unsanitary souvenir [was] left in a prominent place.” They reported the damage to the local police, who began an investigation, though Guy was pretty certain that Hassan was behind it.104 Undoubtedly, he was correct, given the timing and the circumstances.
Meanwhile, even though Mrs. Templeton’s formal claim to the land still had to be heard by the Anglo-Turkish Mixed Arbitral Tribunal, and then by the Land Court in Jerusalem—all of which would proceed at a snail’s pace until 1931105—she was happy to go ahead and sell her part of Tell el-Mutesellim to Breasted and the Oriental Institute, as part of a larger deal in which the local government compensated the rest of the landowners. In early December 1930, therefore, it was announced with great fanfare in the New York Times that the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago had purchased Armageddon from Mrs. Templeton. The headline declared: “Armageddon Battlefield Bought for $3,500 from an American Widow for Exploration.” Although $3,500 may not sound like a lot, it was the equivalent of just over $48,000 today.106
FIG. 17. Memorial plaque for Rosamond Dale Owen Oliphant Templeton, in Maple Hill Cemetery, New Harmony, Indiana (courtesy of Dan Elliott)
Note, however, that this did not necessarily end the matter of expropriation, for letters now in the archives of both the Oriental Institute in Chicago and the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem, as well as in the Israel State Archives, show that the dialogue continued right through the 1930s and into the 1940s, until the 1948 War of Independence ended the discussion, when the land simply became part of the new state of Israel.107
After Mrs. Templeton’s death in 1937, her adopted son Carlos oversaw her burial in the cemetery at Llanwrtyd Church in Newtown, Wales, near her Welsh grandfather. He also arranged for the installation of a memorial plaque in the Maple Hill Cemetery at New Harmony, Indiana, where her father and other family members were buried. On the plaque, Carlos saw to it that her connection to Armageddon would never be forgotten, for the inscription reads:
This Tablet in Loving Memory of
Rosamond Dale Owen Oliphant Templeton
Author, Philosopher, Traveler, Ardent Christian.
Daughter of
Robert Dale Owen.
Member of Minerva Society.
Charter member of New Harmony Woman’s Library Club.
Formerly Owner of Armageddon.
Born—New Harmony—December 13, 1846
Died—Worthing, England—June 19, 1937
Erected by her Devoted Adopted Son,
Carlos Ronzevalle.
Peace! Peace!108
Apart from the events surrounding the expropriation of the land, life at the Megiddo compound was otherwise pretty harmonious from September through December 1928. Edward DeLoach had finally recovered from his bouts of malaria, and whatever else had been ailing him, so he had been cleared by the doctors in Chicago to return to the site, which he did by the end of September.109 As mentioned, Dr. and Mrs. Staples and Robert Lamon had also arrived together at about the same time as DeLoach, in late September, so that by early December they were all “a pretty happy family,” with no “signs of mutiny,” at least according to Guy’s account.110
Since the days were getting shorter, Guy changed the working hours, giving them all time off after lunch, so that they could go on long walks or occasional shooting expeditions, before working again until dinner. He also forbade them to work after dinner, encouraging them instead to read, and even envisioned starting a “study-circle” where they could informally discuss their own finds late into the evening, presumably over a glass of wine or whiskey.111
Guy also made a list of things for them to do during these winter months, before the digging season began again in April. These included making working plans of all the excavation areas; completing the recording of all the pottery and other artifacts from the season that had just concluded; and checking over everything from the 1927 and 1928 seasons. He also envisioned writing two small publications, although he did not manage to complete either one at that time, despite his best intentions.
Chief among the items on his list was a plan to clear away the surface soil in the new areas that he wished to excavate—that is, in the region on the top of the tell that was about to be made available for digging because of the land expropriation. The team had already laid out the boundaries and set the pegs for the new squares by early November, but, as he complained to Breasted a month later, heavy rains put an end to those plans because the top half meter of soil was now completely waterlogged. Instead, he simply sent the Egyptian workmen home to their families until the early spring, rather than continuing the futile efforts.112