Margaret Crosby

Margaret "Missy" Crosby (born August 14, 1901 in Minnesota , † July 30, 1972 in Hanover, New Hampshire ) was an American classical archaeologist and epigraphist .

Life and accomplishments

Margaret Crosby's father, John Crosby (1867–1962) was a wealthy lawyer and businessman and a friend of Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson . She grew up in Minnesota. During a vacation trip with the family, as an eight-year-old girl, she was nicknamed "Missy" by an English sailor, which from then on was to become the commonly used nickname. She had a physically active childhood and adolescence, which included hiking and mountain climbing. In 1922 she received - like Virginia Grace - her Bachelor of Arts at Bryn Mawr College . She then studied in Europe for two years. At that time she still put an emphasis on ancient history . After returning from Europe, she began a doctorate at Yale University . She was the first female archaeologist to visit Dura Europos for her first excavation , where, unlike her male colleagues, she was not only not paid, but also had to bear her own travel expenses. In Dura Europos she was involved in the excavations, but also worked as an epigraphist. After the excavation season in Syria, Crosby finally switched from history to archeology.

After Crosby received her Ph.D. at Yale University, she became a Fellow of the Agora Dig of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens . Initially from 1935 to 1939, she took part in the excavation campaigns in Athens every year. Most of the time, she worked on site for the entire period, generally five months. During this time she supervised the actual excavations. The Agora excavation was a very modern undertaking in its time, which not only gave many young archaeologists the start of a further career, it was also an excavation in which women also played a major role and took on managerial functions from the start. In the second excavation season in 1932, half of the scientific staff was female. Among the young archaeologists of this time were Crosby Homer A. Thompson , Lucy Talcott , Eugene Vanderpool , Benjamin Dean Meritt , Dorothy Burr , Alison Frantz , Virginia Grace , Piet de Jong , Rodney Young and Ioannis "John" Travlos , who often did the excavation Remained loyal for decades. After the outbreak of World War II , Crosby worked for the Greece department of the Office of Strategic Services, founded by Rodney Young and headed by Carl Blegen . The department included a number of archaeologists, including her colleague Alison Frantz from the Agora excavation. The focus of her work was the decoding of texts, a skill that as an epigraphist had already developed and trained while reading ancient texts. Between June and November 1944 she was a liaison officer for the OSS in Cairo . In November 1944 she returned to the OSS Greece Department and went with them to Athens, where she worked for the organization until May 1945.

After work on the agora resumed in 1946, Crosby also returned to the dig. She resumed her position as excavation supervisor and remained in this position until 1955 for the entire excavation season. In 1946, she also took over the duties of Lucy Talcott for one year in collecting the finds. Scientifically, she dealt mainly with the inscriptions and metrology . In 1965 she and Mabel Lang presented the weights and measures found in the agora; to this day the book is one of the standard works in the field of ancient metrology. In Greece, too, she continued to pursue her childhood hobbies and climbed almost all of the highest mountains in Greece. In the course of her career, she repeatedly exceeded the previously unspoken gender rules in her work and was thus a pioneer in the male domain of archeology. This was shown, among other things, in the fact that, unlike most of her colleagues at the Agora excavation, she was really actively involved in the excavations and not in one of the areas of work such as photography (Frantz) or finding (Talcott). At the beginning of the 1960s she finished her active work for the Agora dig and from now on devoted herself to her family, friends, gardening and traveling. Nevertheless, she remained on friendly terms with the Agora excavation and around 1965 helped finance the investigation of the buildings on the south side of the Agora. Since 1962 she lived in Barnard , Vermont and died in a nursing home in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Fonts (selection)

• Greek Inscriptions In: The American Excavations in the Athenian Agora: Twelfth Report. In: Hesperia 6, 1937, pp. 442-468
• A Silver Ladle and Strainer. In: American Journal of Archeology 47, 1943, pp. 209-216
• with Mabel Lang : Weights, Measures and Tokens (= Agora , Volume X). The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton 1964.

literature

• Dr. Margaret Crosby . In: The New York Times . August 2, 1972, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com ).
• Lucy Shoe Meritt : A History of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 1939–1980. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton 1984, various pages ( digitized ).
• Susan I. Rotroff , Robert D. Lamberton : Women in the Athenian Agora (= Agora Picture Book Issue 26). American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton 2006, ISBN 0876616449 , pp. 52–53 Fig. 68 ( digitized version ).

Web links

• Gravestone in Lakewood Cemetery, Minneapolis
• Margaret Crosby Genealogical Page

Individual evidence

1. ^ Boston College: Dura-Europos. Crossroads of antiquity . Chestnut Hill, Mass .; Chicago, Ill .: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2011 ( archive.org ).
2. ↑ Jennifer Baird: Dura-Europos . Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018, ISBN 978-1-4725-2365-5 , pp. 43-44 ( google.com ).
3. ^ Susan Heuck Allen: Classical Spies. American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2011, ISBN 978-0-472-02766-8 .
4. ^ John Manuel Cook: Review , in The Classical Review 15, 1965, pp. 348-349.