Christos Tsountas (; 1857 – 9 June 1934) was a Greek classical archaeologist. He is considered a pioneer of Greek archaeology and has been called "the first and most eminent Greek prehistorian".
Born in Stenimachos in Thrace in 1857, Tsountas received his university education in Germany, at Leibniz University Hannover, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and the University of Jena. After a brief period working as a teacher, he was hired by the Archaeological Society of Athens as an archaeological official in 1882, and joined the Greek Archaeological Service the following year. He was most active as a field archaeologist in the early decades of his life, carrying out the first archaeological survey of Thessaly, excavating several Mycenaean tombs in Laconia, and carrying out the first formal excavations of the citadel of Mycenae. In the late 1890s, his discoveries in the Cyclades generated the first evidence of Cycladic culture, to which Tsountas gave its name.
Tsountas became a professor of the University of Athens in 1904, from which point he largely retired from practical archaeological work. He published several monographs and textbooks on prehistoric archaeology, including works which became standard works in the field. He moved to the University of Thessaloniki between 1925 and 1926, and died in 1934.
Early life, education and early career Christos Tsountas was born to a Greek family in 1857 in Eastern Rumelia, then part of the Ottoman Empire. His baptismal name may have been Christodoulos or Christopoulos. He grew up in Stenimachos (present-day Asenovgrad); he completed his schooling there, in nearby Philippopolis (present-day Plovdiv) and in Athens. As was common for aspiring Greek archaeologists in the nineteenth century, Tsountas subsequently studied in Germany; initially, he read engineering at the Royal College of Technology in Hannover, before moving to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München to read philology under the classical archaeologist Heinrich Brunn. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Jena in 1880.
On returning from Jena, Tsountas taught for a year at the Zariphios School, a Greek school in Philippopolis. In 1882, Tsountas was hired by the Archaeological Society of Athens, a learned society involved in the excavation and conservation of ancient monuments. One of his first postings was in 1882, to the excavations of the British architect Francis Penrose at the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. In the same year, Panagiotis Stamatakis, the Ephor General in charge of the Greek Archaeological Service, invited Tsountas to accompany him on a tour of Boeotia, combatting the illicit trade in antiquities — an event which has been described by the archaeological historian Eleni Konstantinidi-Syvridi as the beginning of Tsountas's apprenticeship to Stamatakis.
In 1883, Tsountas joined the Greek Archaeological Service, during its first major period of expansion. Before 1879, the Service had consisted entirely of the Ephor General, sometimes with an assistant. After the hiring of Panagiotis Kavvadias in 1879 and of Konstantinos Dimitriadis in 1881, Tsountas was recruited by Stamatakis as an ephor alongside Demetrios Philios; they would be joined by Valerios Stais, Vasileios Leonardos and Georgios Lampakis in 1885. On , he was promoted to be the Service's ephor for Arta and Aetolia-Acarnania, both in northwestern Greece, but remained in Athens, working for both the Archaeological Service and the Archaeological Society. He was primarily based at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens.
Excavations Most of Tsountas's excavations took place in his early career, with a particular concentration between 1886 and 1908. Between 1880 and 1891, Tsountas excavated in the southern Greek region of Laconia. His excavations there included the tomb at Vapheio; although the tomb had previously been cleared in 1805, Tsountas discovered an intact burial in its floor, with grave goods including the two Vapheio Cups. Tsountas was the first modern archaeologist to excavate and publish a burial in a , demonstrating that the monuments were constructed as tombs and disproving the then-widespread belief that they were constructed as royal treasuries. Tsountas's campaign in Laconia also included the excavation, in 1890, of the Mycenaean shrine known as the Amyklaion. There, he discovered two sculpted heads, known as the "Amyklai Heads", which have been variously dated to the Mycenaean and the Geometric periods, and one of which may have represented the god Apollo.
From 1884, he worked on the Acropolis of Athens. In 1884, he led an underwater survey to investigate the site of the Battle of Salamis, which took place in 480 BCE; though poor weather made the enterprise largely unsuccessful, it may have been the first archaeological work to take place under water. He also excavated at the Mycenaean citadel of Tiryns in the Argolid between 1890 and 1891.
In 1887, Tsountas excavated the looted cemeteries of Tanagra in Boeotia. He worked at Tiryns in 1890–1891, and excavated the tomb at Kambos near Avia in Messenia in 1891, uncovering Minoan-type figurines. Between 1890 and 1892, he assisted Kavvadias, then Ephor General, in cataloguing the prehistoric material in the National Archaeological Museum. Tsountas was made curator of the museum's Mycenaean and Egyptian collections by 1896, by which point he had also written the catalogue for its Mycenaean material.
Mycenae
Following the excavation of Grave Circle A at Mycenae under the German businessman Heinrich Schliemann and Stamatakis in 1876–1877, Tsountas took over the site from May 1886 until 1910. He made the first excavations in the Prehistoric Cemetery around the settlement of Mycenae and carried out the first major excavations of its acropolis, where he uncovered the Great Ramp, cleared the slopes of the citadel and uncovered a large proportion of its buildings. Tsountas's discovery of Ancient Egyptian material, including seven faience plaques bearing the name of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, on the acropolis gave the first definitive evidence of the site's date in the Late Bronze Age (); it had previously been dated only in vague terms, often described by travellers in terms such as "of the most ancient date", or considered to date to various periods around 1000 BCE.
The main purpose of Tsountas's initial excavations of 1886 was to discover the palatial centre of the site of Mycenae. In that year, he cleared the majority of the citadel, discovering the palace and and excavating the Hellenistic temple built atop the acropolis; he would later remove the temple's remains, as well as most of those from post-Mycenaean periods, to further reveal the Bronze Age palace. In the same year, he excavated on the western slope of the citadel, in the area of a Hellenistic tower, and uncovered a building complex later identified as part of the site's "Cult Centre".
In 1887, Tsountas commenced his excavations of the cemeteries outside the citadel of Mycenae, considering the graves excavated in Circle A to be "royal" and consequently seeking to find what he considered the burials of the rest of the site's population. Between 1887 and 1898, Tsountas excavated 103 chamber tombs and three previously unknown tombs (known as the Tomb of Aegisthus, the and the ), while he also cleared four that had already been discovered. In 2006, Tsountas's excavations represented just under half of the total number of chamber tombs excavated at Mycenae, though the sparse documentation made by Tsountas has limited their use for archaeological study.
In 1888, Tsountas made further excavations of the palace, as well as in the eastern part of the citadel, particularly the North East Extension and Mycenae's subterranean cistern, which he discovered. Excavations here continued in 1889, during which time Tsountas made further explorations of the south-western part of the citadel, uncovering a series of buildings over several seasons of work but making little record of them. In 1890, he cleared the northern and north-western slopes of the city; by 1893, he had progressed to the North Gate. In 1895 and 1896, he cleared the eastern and western slopes of the acropolis, and returned in 1896 to the south-western slope. This left unexcavated only a small area on the western slope of the citadel, now known as the "Citadel House" area.
Tsountas's notes on the excavations of the site's chamber tombs were inconsistent, and often left little evidence as to which tomb was being referred to; in the 1990s, the archaeologist Kim Shelton established the correspondence between many of the tombs excavated and numbered by Tsountas and the archaeological remains still visible at the site. His discovery of Egyptian material within the citadel established its date as belonging to the Late Bronze Age. In the late 1880s, he excavated the two tombs known as Kato Phournos and Epano Phournos, which had previously been believed to be gates. In 1891, he excavated the Tomb of Clytemnestra. In contrast to the orthodoxy then prevalent, Tsountas considered the chamber tombs and at the site to postdate the shaft graves of Circle A. He also disavowed the association, claimed by Schliemann, between the burials at Mycenae and the characters of the Homeric epics. From 1899 to 1903, he was responsible for the consolidation and restoration of the monuments at Mycenae.
Thessaly
The region of Thessaly, in northern Greece, had been the subject of brief and informal antiquarian investigations in the final decades of Ottoman rule prior to 1881. This included visits from foreign antiquarians as well as a study by the medical doctor Nikolaos Georgiades, who published a historical, geographical and topographical study of the region in 1880. The region was incorporated into the Greek state in 1881, and therefore came under the jurisdiction of the Greek Archaeological Service; this development intensified efforts to collect and conserve known antiquities, still largely on an informal basis – the headteachers of local gymnasia would often be designated by the Archaeological Service as "Occasional Collectors of Antiquities" and organise small collections of portable finds, sometimes working alongside foreign scholars such as the German archaeologist Habbo Gerhard Lolling. The Archaeological Service occasionally sent representatives to conduct rescue excavations, as did the Archaeological Society of Athens, which established several local collections of artefacts, including one in a primary school at Larissa which included 166 objects.
In 1889, Tsountas, who was by then the Head of Antiquities for the Archaeological Society, made the first systematic archaeological investigation of the area. His first excavation was that of a Mycenaean burial tumulus at Marmariani. In the course of excavating five Mycenaean tombs at the site, he uncovered levels of settlement deposits dating to the Neolithic period, providing the first evidence of Neolithic material in Greece and demonstrating that mounds of this kinds, known as , could be tells formed from the deposited layers of settlements of successive periods. Tsountas subsequently excavated Mycenaean tombs at the mound known as (ancient Iolkos) near Volos in 1900, at Volos itself in 1901–1903, and at Sesklo from 1901 to 1902. His colleague Stais had conducted excacations at Dimini in 1901–1902; Stais subsequently withdrew from Thessaly to focus on his work in Attica, and Tsountas received permission from him and the Archaeological Society to carry on the excavation of Dimini. In 1903, he uncovered three defensive walls at the site. Volos, Sesklo and Dimini subsequently became considered type sites for the Neolithic period in Greece. Tsountas continued to visit and conduct field survey in Thessaly each summer until 1906.
Cyclades and other islands