Theodore Leslie Shear

This article deals with the archaeologist Theodore Leslie Shear (1880–1945). For his son Theodore Leslie Shear, Jr. (* 1938) see T. Leslie Shear, Jr.

Theodore Leslie Shear (born August 11, 1880 in New London , New Hampshire , † July 3, 1945 at Lake Sunapee , New London, New Hampshire) was an American classical archaeologist .

Thedore Leslie Shear, son of Theodore R. Shear (1847-1909) and Mary Louise Quackenbush, attended Halsey Collegiate School in New York . He studied at New York University from 1896 ( AB 1900; AM 1901). From 1901 he studied at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in particular with the classical philologist Basil L. Gildersleeve and received his doctorate there in 1904 . He then spent a year at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and studied in 1905/6 at the University of Bonn with Georg Loeschcke . In 1906 he became an instructor in Greek and Latin at Barnard College in New York, and from 1911 to 1923 he taught as an associate professor in Greek at Columbia University . From 1921 he was a lecturer in Art and Archeology at Princeton University , where he taught as a professor of classical archeology from 1928 until his death.

In 1911 he dug in Knidos , in 1922 he led the excavations in Sardis and carried out an excavation on the Hymettos , from 1925 to 1931 he led the excavations of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in Corinth . In 1931 he began the excavations on the Agora of Athens , financed by John D. Rockefeller , on behalf of the American School, which had to be temporarily stopped in 1939 as a result of the war. Within a very short time, the marketplace of ancient Athens was uncovered under his leadership , with the help of a group of young archaeologists, including Homer A. Thompson , Eugene Vanderpool , Benjamin D. Meritt , Dorothy Burr , Virginia Grace , Lucy Talcott , Alison Frantz , Piet de Jong , Margaret Crosby , Rodney Young and John Travlos . In 1934 Shear was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Shear was married from 1907 in their first marriage to Nora Cornelia Jenkins († 1927), in their second marriage from 1931 to the archaeologist Josephine Platner (1901-1967). Her son is the archaeologist T. Leslie Shear, Jr. (* 1938), who was also the head of the excavations at the Athens Agora from 1968 to 1994.

Publications (selection)

• The Influence of Plato on Saint Basil . Furst, Baltimore 1906 ( digitized version ; handwritten version , = dissertation).
• Architectural terra-cottas (= Sardis Vol. 10, 1). Brill, Leiden 1926.
• The Roman Villa . (= Corinth. Results of excavations Vol. 5). Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1930.

literature

• Homer A. Thompson : Theodore Leslie Shear . In: Bulletin of the Archaeological Institute of America 1945, pp. 45-46.
• Richard Stillwell : Theodore Leslie Shear . In: American Journal of Archeology 49, 1945, pp. 582-583.
• Commemorative Studies in honor of Theodore Leslie Shear (= Hesperia Supplement 18). Princeton 1949 (pp. Vii – xi list of publications; full text ).
• Who Was Who in America . Vol. 2, Chicago 1950, p. 483.
• Encyclopedia of American Biography New Series Vol. 29, 1959, pp. VI-IX.
• Nancy Thomson de Grummond (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archeology . Greenwood Press, Westport, CT 1996, Vol. 2, pp. 1026-1027.
• Rachel Hood: Faces of Archeology in Greece. Caricatures by Piet de Jong. Leopard's Head Press, Oxford 1998, ISBN 0-904920-38-0 , pp. 172-176.

Web links

• Image by Theodore Leslie Shear and Josephine Platner Shear, 1936