The Ancients - The First Black Archaeologist

Episode Date: October 23, 2022

Born to slaves in 1863, John Wesley Gilbert was the first student of the Paine Institute, a graduate of Brown University, and the first black archaeologist.While at Brown, he was awarded a scholarship to study abroad at the American School of Classical studies in Athens, Greece. Here, he helped to shape modern archaeology as we know it today. Working tirelessly, and meticulously on excavations where he helped uncover the ancient city of Eretria, Gilbert also travelled across the country to beautiful ancient sites, and even attended the funeral of Heinrich Schliemann - the man who discovered Troy.In this episode, Tristan is joined by Professor John W.I Lee from UC Santa Barbara to talk about Gilbert's incredible life, and the legacy that he left behind.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Enter promo code ANCIENTS for a free trial, plus 50% off your first three months' subscription.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's podcast, well, some of my favourite episodes are when we focus on the life of one particular figure and look at what they did and their legacy that has endured down to the present day.

We're doing exactly the same today, but this figure, he's not an ancient figure. He's an archaeologist. His name was John Wesley Gilbert, and he's labelled as the first black archaeologist. He lived in the late 19th century in the aftermath of the American Civil War. He would study archaeology, he would venture to Greece, he would take part in excavations there, and his legacy endures down to this present day. Now, to talk through the life and the importance of John Wesley Gilbert to the field of archaeology and so much more, I was delighted to chat to Professor John Lee from the University of California, Santa Barbara a few days back.

And without further ado, to talk through the life and legacy of John Wesley Gilbert, the first black archaeologist, here's John. John, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thank you, Tristan. It's really great to be with you. And it's really interesting to do this topic, a bit different, but I love focusing on the stories of the archaeologists themselves. And John Wesley Gilbert, he is such an extraordinary figure, isn't he? His story about how he comes, how he merges into archaeology, how he finds interest in it, and well, his whole story. Yeah, he has a truly extraordinary and inspiring life for a young person born into slavery, then who grew up in the segregated south of the United States, who faced racism and violence and just challenges in getting a basic education,

that he rose to the top of his profession and was a pioneer as an archaeologist in Greece is truly amazing. You know, he was one of the first Americans to go to Greece to conduct archaeological work. Absolutely. And we're going to delve into all of that in the next 40 minutes or so. But John, set the scene first of all. So when John Gilbert is born, when are we talking about? What's the scene in the United States at the time? John Wesley Gilbert was born in 1863 in Georgia, probably on the property of the slave master who owned him and his mother and his family.

It was the middle of the Civil War, probably a couple of days after the Battle of Gettysburg. And so his early weeks and months were the time when the Confederacy was falling apart, was dissolving as the rebellion of the slave-owning states was being defeated by the United States. Right. And so with that background, so what happens when the Civil War comes to an end? What do we know about John Wesley Gilbert's early life and his childhood education at this time? Yes, absolutely. Well, in one respect, his early life is not unusual. And that is because even during the Civil War, and especially after it, newly freed African Americans flocked to education.

They are free. They want their rights as citizens. They want all the opportunities the United States has to offer. And young and old, men and women, boys and girls, black people want an education. And they go to the schools they can find, which are set up by missionaries coming from the North, set up by the federal government, set up by churches and other groups, and by local black communities. So in that respect, his early quest for schooling fits in with what an entire generation of African Americans was doing. And so of all the paths to go down in education, what drove John Wesley Gilbert towards ancient

Greek? That is a great question. So today, in 2022, we might ask, well, why ancient Greek? But if you were looking for the gold standard of education, whether it was in North America or in Europe or in the UK in the 19th century, it was classics. It was Greek and Latin. So when African-Americans looked for the best traditions of contemporary education, they wanted what white Americans had already, which was a classical education. And so for Gilbert to become interested in Greek and Latin fit in with the pattern of his age. For African Americans in

particular, Greek, I think, was especially valued because it was the language of the Bible. And so we often think about reading Greek as reading the great plays or reading the classical authors, but reading the Bible was especially important for African Americans. So therefore, from what you were saying there, John, to the teaching of ancient Greek alongside Latin, as you say, it was quite widespread at this time in the late 19th century America. Yes, it was the standard for college, university curricula. And one thing that black people hoped to do or they aimed to do was to dispel racist notions that, well, black people cannot learn Greek or Latin. There is a notorious South Carolina senator, John C. Calhoun, who

is supposed to have said he would believe that a black person was his intellectual equal when he could see that person reading Greek. And so African Americans took up that challenge and they exceeded and excelled at it. It was also not just educational, but you might say a political move to claim part of this intellectual heritage. And to talk about where John Wesley Gilbert excelled in it, what do we know about the college that he went to? I would start even a little bit before that. One thing that was quite exceptional about his early education was that he was able to go to public school in Georgia with both black and white school teachers. So he got a very good

foundation there, but his Greek learning began at two different schools. The first was a school called the Augusta Institute, which later became Atlanta Baptist Seminary and is today Morehouse College. So he studied Greek there with both white and black instructors. And then he studied Greek back in Augusta at a school called Payne Institute, which was founded by a cooperative group of black and white Methodists, Southern Methodists working together. So he studied Greek there. And then he went on to Brown University in 1886, where he was the third black graduate of Brown University. And he studied the typical Greek curriculum of the top colleges and universities in the United States in the 1880s. It seems on one level, therefore, ancient Greek, learning of ancient Greek,

part of John Wesley Gilbert's life. But it does also beg the question, how does looking at ancient Greek, learning, studying, excelling in ancient Greek, lead him into a path of a career of archaeology? Yes, and that's the part where he really does stand out. You know, at the time when Gilbert went to Brown University in the mid-1880s, the archaeology that we think of today, you know, scientific, systematic archaeology with proper recording and stratigraphy, you know, examination of different levels, understanding of ceramics. In Greece, this was kind of just in the beginning stages. The 1870s, 80s had seen kind of a transition from the old treasure hunting into a more professional archaeology. So there'd been French archaeologists, there were Germans,

the British school, the British archaeologists were there, and the Americans were kind of the newcomer on the scene. So for Gilbert to go from classics, which was widespread, to archaeology, which was really a new discipline, it was a big step. There were not many people in the United States who could really be said to have any expertise in Greek archaeology. And do we know, therefore, how he fared? Did he enjoy his time at Brown focusing on archaeology? Do we have much insight into his life at the university studying this early archaeology? We do know something about the kinds of classes that he took and about the professors with whom he worked. Probably some of the earliest archaeological study he did was actually in a class that focused on geology. And

so there was a geology elective, which was very popular, and that professor incorporated material on what we might call New World archaeology, dome tools, and so on. But it was also the time when visiting lecturers were coming to Brown to talk about the archaeology of Rome, for example. A lecturer came to talk about the Bible and the seriology, which was also just becoming a discipline. But above all, it was Gilbert's relationship with a professor named Albert Harkness that got him pointed towards Greece. People don't know much about Albert Harkness today, but back in the 1880s, he was probably one of the most prominent classical scholars in North America. And he was an outlier because he was interested in Greece and this new

institution called the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. And it was Harkness who said to Gilbert, you should consider going to Greece and you should consider studying there. And part of your work will be reading the classic texts, but you will also have the chance to take part in excavations. It's wonderful and so interesting to hear of the opportunity that John Wesley Gilbert got from Brown, and we will therefore go to Athens as the next step in our chat. But I must also ask, did John Wesley Gilbert face any racism during his time at Brown University? Did he have any challenges compared to other students? What do we know about that more infamous side? Absolutely. So you have to remember that Gilbert came from the segregated South to Providence, Rhode Island, where Brown was, where race relations were quite different. There were integrated social gatherings. There

was a black legislature in the Rhode Island legislature. So in one respect, it was a different world. There was still discrimination. And on campus, from my research, I can tell that when he moved into New Dorm, that everyone else on that floor moved out. And we tell this through an examination of the course catalogs, the yearbooks from Brown. So there was a racist response. And the young students had never seen a black college student, a fellow student. The professors had because the older professors remembered the first two African-Americans who had studied at Brown in the 1870s. So on one hand, there was a racist response from some students.

But on the other hand, Gilbert made friends with his classmates. And by the time of his senior year, he was bringing his white classmates with him to his church in Providence, and they were sharing the pulpit together. So there was both sides of the story. And I think you can see in the way that he persevered through that initial racist response to reach out and make an interracial connection. This is something that defined his life, was a real interest and a commitment to cooperative work between white people and black people in the US. So if we therefore go to Athens next, as you hinted at in our chats, John, but of course, nowadays going from the United States to Athens, hop on a plane, quite easy, you're there the next day. But I'm quite fascinated in the journey itself. How does John Wesley Gilbert get from Brown University to Athens?

The first thing we should mention is that to travel, you need money. And another thing that Albert Harkness did was he got a fellowship for John Wesley Gilbert. There had been other African-Americans who had been invited to go to Greece Greece to the American school. And one of them, William Sanders Scarborough, who's maybe the most famous African American classical scholar of this era, wanted to go, but he could never find the funding. So to go abroad, first you have to have the money. And that was, again, thanks to Brown. Gilbert actually, after graduating, had returned to his hometown of Augusta, Georgia, He went across the Atlantic, landed in Liverpool. He spent some time in London. He was very, very interested in London and actually English literature and Shakespeare.

He went to hear a very famous preacher do a Sunday sermon in London. And then across the channel, Paris, Switzerland, Italy, another ferry to Patras in Greece, and then a train from Patras to Athens. And that train line had just been opened about a year before he got on it. So, yeah, it was not a matter of getting on a quick jet plane. It was a three-week journey. Absolutely, an arduous journey in itself. And when he finally, therefore, reaches Athens, his final destination, to the American School of Classics in Athens.

But what exactly does this school look like at this time? You know, if you go to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens today, you'll actually see the original building. It's still right there. It's now been greatly expanded and it's now in the middle of a city of several million people. middle of a city of several million people. But in 1890, when Gilbert arrived at the American School, the building was kind of out in the open on the eastern outskirts of Athens. And there were open fields, there was olive trees down below. The only neighbor was the British School at Athens, which was right next door. And otherwise, Athens was a very different place. It was a city of only about 100,000 people. And the American school he went to was just at the very eastern edge, looking out over these open fields and olive groves.

It sounds quite idyllic in one sort of way, if you're outside the center and you have this beautiful landscape there. So what do we know, therefore, about his early time in Athens, outside of America at the school? We can tell first that he knew enough Greek, modern Greek, he had studied modern Greek, so that he could speak with locals. And so his early interactions were probably finding a place to eat. He might have eaten at a restaurant down closer to the center of town. Actually, it's nice to be out in this place with a great view, but a lot of the early students of the American school were unhappy because it was a long way to the shops and the restaurants. So he would have had that kind of exploration of becoming familiar with a new city

and becoming conversant with the local language. So he knew not only ancient Greek, but also he spoke the modern living language. And he soon became involved with the local Greek church, a Protestant church there, which still exists today, the Greek Evangelical Church, where he could listen to sermons in Greek, and he would hear familiar hymns, but sung in Greek. So his early interactions would have been centered, I think, on talking to people at the church and on becoming familiar with this new and very different city. And so how long does he therefore stay at the School of Athens? What do we know about his learning, about his studying there?

Yes, he's there for an academic year. So basically fall of 1890 to the spring of 1891. And, you know, today the American school has a very developed academic program. But in 1890, it was the school had only been around for about a decade. And it was very much still figuring things out. There were only four students, including Gilbert. So he worked with his three other fellow students. And there were oddly two professors because the school hadn't figured out how to have a permanent on-site director. So one professor came from Dartmouth for the year.

Another professor was actually, although he was an American in origin, he had a position at Cambridge. So he only came in the second part of the year. So the academic program, Gilbert might have been a bit surprised because he may have thought he would be spending a lot of time in the library with the archaeology as kind of a side aspect. kind of a side aspect, but his professor, the Dartmouth professor, a man named Rufus Richardson, had a very different idea. And his idea was, we're going to go and explore the landscape of Athens, and we're going to use the text of the Roman author Pausanias, who had written like a travel guide, you could say, a description of Greece during the period of the Roman Empire. So this was all the rage in 1890. People were coming to Athens, they would hold their Pausanias in hand, they would walk around the city, look at the new excavations that were occurring, look at the remains they could see on the surface, and try to figure out if they could identify what Pausanias had described 1,700 years before,

and if they could see the remains on the surface. They were wandering the city with Pausanias in hand. Fantastic. Walking in the footsteps of the ancients almost there. And so how does John Wesley Gilbert react to this sort of teaching? I'm guessing he grasps it with both hands. Yes, I think because he was part of a small group. There were only four students and the one professor. They were all American collegians. They all shared a kind of a common education, even though they came from pretty different backgrounds. And in the fall, they walked for three days from Athens to the battlefield of Marathon, then to the temple site of Ramnus, then to north to a religious sanctuary, the Amphiareon, and then back. You know, they covered some 60 or 70 miles in these three days. And they were some of the first Americans to see the Marathon burial mound, the Soros, after it had been identified as the burial mound of the

Athenians killed at the Battle of Marathon. And so he would have experienced that as well as walking around the city of Athens. And I mentioned Marathon because for African-American writers in the 1880s, the Marathon had a very special significance because these writers would often place the black soldiers of the civil war and the American revolution as the true heirs of the Athenians who fought for freedom and marathon or the true heirs of the Greeks who fought at Thermopylae against Persian invasion. There was even one writer's book about the black phalanx, the soldiers of the civil war as the black phalanx. So this would have had, I think, a particular resonance for Gilbert, given that he knew black veterans of the Union Army. He had probably talked to some of them in Brown and in Augusta. So he would have had a response that

was conditioned by kind of a contemporary African-American reading of Marathon and the Greek struggle for freedom. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, host of the new podcast, American History Hit. Twice a week, I'll be exploring stories from America's past to help us understand the United States of today. Join me as I head back in time to witness Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence, head to the battlefields during the Civil War, visit Chief Poitin as he prepares for war with English colonists, tour Central Park before it was Central Park,

and a city in Tennessee which helped build the atomic bomb. From famous battlefields to secret cities, from familiar names to lesser-known events, I'll speak with leading experts from across the United States and beyond to bring American history to life. Join me every Monday and Thursday for American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. that's so interesting john so rather than sparta or corinth or any of these other ancient greek city-states for john wesley gilbert was there a main interest could you say do you think on the city-state of athens on the region of Attica and its ancient history compared to other areas of Greece? Yes, except when we talk about his excavation work, it's outside of Athens. But Athens would have been a focus because, of course, the American school is there.

The classical education that he had done in the U.S. emphasized, you know, the Athenian playwrights, the Greek historians. And Sparta, he did not have a chance to visit, so that gave him less reason to be particularly interested in Sparta. And if I jump ahead a little bit, at the very end of his year in Greece, the publication of what's called the Constitution of the Athenians, which was attributed to Aristotle, a description of Athenian government, caused a huge, a huge splash. And this was announced, I think it was January 1891, that the papyrus had been found and was published in London. And that made everybody just fascinated with Athenian government, Athenian institutions. And that would have, I think, would have really played a large role in his, you know, what he focused on while he was in Athens.

So I've got my notes here. Forgive me if I'm completely wrong, but his MA thesis was titled The Deems of Athens. Yes, yes. And, you know, here we are, we face the problems of evidence. We don't actually have the MA thesis, but I'm an ancient historian, so I can tell you a bit of what it was about. But I'm an ancient historian, so I can tell you a bit of what it was about. I mentioned that topographical study, the reading Pausanias and then trying to reconstruct what Athens was like. The Deems, the neighborhoods of Athens, were a topic of great interest because they could be associated with famous Athenians, Socrates, Plato, etc. We knew the names of their home Deems were known. Plato, etc. We knew the names of their home deems were known. And so his research seems to have focused on where the urban deems, the city deems of Athens could be located. And that involved walking around the city of Athens. It involved reading classical texts. And unfortunately,

I mentioned the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens. That was published just after he finished his thesis. So it kind of, he was scooped in a way because there was a lot of information he could have used in that. But even so, this kind of topographical research that he did for his thesis on the themes of Athens was really, it was at the cutting edge of what scholars were doing at the time, trying to figure out the city organization and the topography of Athens. And today, that's a very big, still a very big interest of U.S. scholars. And he's really the first American to write about urban themes. People had given reports before on individual themes, but his thesis, although we sadly don't have it, is the first written research on the

topic by an American. Well, you've mentioned, you've talked about his travels around Attica. But John, of course, those travels, they don't stop with just Attica, do they? Yes. The last part of the school year, in February and March, the school undertook an excavation of the ancient city of Eretria. And Eretria is on the island of Euboea, or Euboea as it would be pronounced today, which is north. It's the island that kind of lies alongside the coast of central Greece. So Gilbert was part of the American school team that excavated there at Eretria. And it was one of the school's very first excavations.

You know, the Americans were just finding their feet and their methodology, shall we say, was not yet super scientific, but they took part in excavating graves at the city and looking for other ancient remains. And actually the most important work that Gilbert did was not digging because the American method was still very much treasure hunting. He and his classmate or colleague, I guess you could say, a man named John Picard. Gilbert and Picard together worked on a topographical survey of the ancient fortifications of the city of Eretria. And that is really significant. This was only the third kind of scientific archaeological survey Americans had done in Greece. It was the first one to have really proper surveying equipment, the first one

to use proper metric measurements. You know, back then we thought we'd be metric, but here we are. We're still not metric. And in the course of this careful survey, Gilbert and Picard recorded and analyzed a lot of material that has been lost. Because in the years since they were there in 1891, the walls were destroyed or dragged off, buildings collapsed. And so much of what they recorded was no longer survives. But thanks to their careful, scientific, and systematic survey, we can actually see a lot more about the ancient remains at Eretria. And this is fascinating. You say Eretria, I think, because that's quite linked also to the Persian story and Marathon, because I believe they saccharitria before coming to marathon.

So I guess once again, you get that link to the Persian wars and the fight for freedom. So Gilbert plays an incredibly important, significant role in the first excavations here, that the legacy of which they must still have significance down to the present day. Well, I mentioned the publication or the survey that Gilbert and Picard did. Picard eventually published that. He makes a point of thanking John Wesley Gilbert for his contributions in the very beginning of that essay. And that publication is still consulted today

by the Greek and the Swiss archaeologists who work on Eretria. Now, their survey was wrong on many points because it was 120 years ago and they misread some of the remains, but it provided a very solid foundation for future research. So it is still of significance today. And for the American school's development of, you know, scientific archaeology, it was a pretty important step past the kind of amateurish poking around of the 1880s and into the very professional methods that the school developed from the 1890s onward. I mean, talking about which, keep on that,

because Heinrich Schliemann, he's been in Greece already previous to this point. Did John Wesley Gilbert and Schliemann's paths, did they ever cross during their time? Yes, I think that they did meet before Schliemann left Greece for the last time. He went to, if I remember right, Germany to get medical treatment. So Gilbert and the other students were probably introduced at least briefly to Schliemann because Rufus Richardson, their professor, mentions going to Schliemann's house. And I think it's likely that the students also met Schliemann. But Gilbert certainly attended Heinrich Schliemann's funeral, which was held in Athens in January of 1891, because Schliemann died on the way back

to Greece in December, and his body was returned to Athens. And there was a very, very elaborate funeral and memorial that was held, and Gilbert was part of the whole event. So he probably met Schliemann. He certainly was part of the whole event. So he probably met Schliemann. He certainly was part of the commemoration of Schliemann's funeral. That's so interesting to hear that, the potential meeting of both of them. John, okay, let's go back to Eritrea, or let's go back to excavations archaeology associated with John Wesley Gilbert and his colleagues, because we mentioned Eritrea, but I must also, because it is in my notes, I've got to ask about the tomb of Aristotle fiasco. What is this? Yeah. Oh, okay. So I talked

about the two professors earlier on, Rufus Richardson from Dartmouth and the so-called permanent director of the American school, Charles Waldstein, who had the position at Cambridge. And so Waldstein arrived in Athens in the beginning of 1890, sorry, the end of 1890, beginning of 1891. He wants to go to Eretria, not because of the city walls, not because of scientific archaeology, but Waldstein is really, he's a representative of the kind of older age of looking for pretty stuff. And the British school students have been working on some painted, very fine painted pottery, these white ground lekythoi, which come out of graves at Eretria. And Waldstein wants these lekythoi. He says that in his diary, you know, he's looking for

lekythoi. He also wants to find a very famous temple of Artemis that's described by the Greek geographer Thrabo. So in the course of poking around for Lekithoi and for poking around for this temple, Waldstein finds a tomb. And it's a big tomb with marble, with marble, a marble facade. And inside, as he digs around, he finds an inscription that mentions a daughter of Aristotle. And this quickly gets converted into, well, if the daughter of Aristotle is buried here, then Aristotle himself must be buried there. And now to us, that might seem outlandish, but remember, this is just after the constitution of the Athenians that new found text attributed to Aristotle has been found. So in February, March, 1891, everybody's got Aristotle on the brain, right? And it's not,

if we can find Aristotle's treatise on Athenian government, Papyrus in the British Museum, why can't we find Aristotle's actual grave? And I think Waldstein gets carried away by that. And some of the statements he makes get picked up by the media and they create kind of a global factoid. And then, poof, you've got the tomb of Aristotle. But, of course, it's not the tomb of Aristotle. It's a tomb from at least a century later. And the other archaeologists in Athens are shaking their head that how can Waldstein be, you know, how can he succumb to this kind of crazy, crazy idea? And I guess that some people may have heard about the, you know, the so-called tomb of Aristotle. Even in recent years, about five years ago, you know, a Greek

archaeologist claimed to have discovered the tomb of Aristotle in northern Greece. And so this kind of quest for Aristotle's tomb goes on. But what that did was it really overshadowed the survey work of Gilbert and Picard. So when people think about the American excavation at Eretria, they're more likely to think, oh, that was where they thought they found the tomb of Aristotle. They're not as likely to think, oh, that's where the Americans with Gilbert and Picard really began to do systematic survey work. So the kind of the media attention to this supposed tomb really overwhelmed the actual scientific results that the Americans were achieving there. So key point to this podcast level, don't let that tomb overshadow the work that they did. Yes, absolutely. You know, if I could add to that,

John Wesley Gilbert has been, you know, become famous as the first black archaeologist, but it's important to remember that his big contribution is survey archaeology, and sort of the stereotype of archaeology is digging up stuff, but it is as important and sometimes more

important to get a view of the landscape and the visible surface remains and to record and analyze those things. So survey is as much a part of archaeology as digging is. And that is a really, really important thing for us to remember. And that's a great point to mention, absolutely. And the less destructive side of archaeology too. Well, therefore, let's continue with John Wesley Gilbert's story so following on from the excavations at Eritrea what do we know about the rest of John Wesley Gilbert's time in Greece we know that he wanted to stay longer but he had two issues one was that his wife was pregnant with their second

child and he must have gotten a letter you know saying the baby is coming and the other issue was that he was short on money because it was more expensive to live in Athens than he had anticipated. But he was able to make one final trip to the Peloponnese. And this is a very interesting trip because he goes along, I mentioned John Picard, his teammate, he goes along with John Picard's mother-in-law and two of his wife's cousins. So here is an African-American scholar escorting three white American women, right? Now this is in the United States in the South that would not, you know, he would not have been able to do that. But in Greece, this occasion, no surprise whatsoever. And it's likely that Picard asked Gilbert to accompany his relatives because they didn't know any Greek at

all. And Gilbert by this time was probably pretty good, a good Greek speaker. So this quartet was able to make a really wide-ranging trip through the Peloponnese where they visited the harbor town of Nafplio. They went to Mycenae, so they saw the Mycenaean graves there and the citadel of Mycenae. They were able to go along the coast of the Peloponnesus and all the way down to the site of Olympia where the Germans had been excavating. So although he had to go back and he left fairly early in the spring in April of 1891, he was able to see a wide range of sites in the Peloponnese, both prehistoric sites and Olympia, one of the most famous of classical Greek sites.

But it is really interesting actually that civil rights thing you mentioned there. So at the time in the late 19th century in Greece, the state of civil rights, and as you say, a black person escorting three women around the Peloponnese, the Greeks, that's not an issue whatsoever compared to the United States at that time. I think it's also really interesting to highlight that difference in attitudes between the two countries at that time. Yes, absolutely. And that would have begun for African American travelers, that change began when they landed their first landing in Europe. A journalist, Ida B. Wells, has a terrific passage where she describes landing in Liverpool,

and she says, it is like being born into another world, to go into any place you want, any building, any restaurant, any conveyance, any anywhere, and to be received with regular politeness and courtesy. And that kind of experience was described by many African-American travelers throughout Europe, where they found themselves welcomed. And they also had the advantage, you know, in 1890, the United States was not yet a world power. And Greeks, to the extent they were aware of what the United States was, they remembered the philanthropic and relief assistance that Americans had given during the War of Independence. So there was, from older Greeks or from others who had a knowledge of those, that assistance, there was a very positive response to Americans.

So it was a different world. And Ida Wells's description, I think, would have been equally applicable to Gilbert in his life in Greece. And you mentioned War of Independence. Are we talking about the Greek War of Independence? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Because it's not confusing to you. Well, moving on, therefore, from that, John. So John Wesley Gilbert, he returns to the United States. Does he continue a career in archaeology after that? He returns to the United States and he teaches at Payne College in Augusta, Georgia,

as long as he can. In fact, basically until he's too ill to keep on working there. And he incorporates lessons about archaeology and archaeological material in his Greek classes, in his history classes, and so on. But he doesn't teach dedicated archaeology classes archaeological material in his Greek classes, in his history classes, and so on. But he doesn't teach dedicated archaeology classes. And partly that's a result of the lack of equipment. If you want to do archaeology, you need lantern slides, you need a collection of artifacts, you need textbooks, and Paine College does not have the resources for those things. So he never teaches a dedicated archaeology class, although we know that he, even to the end of his life, had a collection of artifacts that was in his... One of his students

actually mentioned seeing these artifacts in his study, I guess you could say, when he visited Professor Gilbert's home. And it's important to remember that in those times there was a legal market for buying antiquities in Athens. So you could actually go to these stores and the guidebooks even said where to go to buy your antiquities. I think he retained an interest. He must have taught it. We know that he attended a convention of the Archaeological Institute of America held in Philadelphia, and he must have been very interested in the different archaeological presentations on Greece that were there. One of them was actually a presentation on a survey of the ancient city of Corinth, which was really building on the methods that Gilbert and Picard had

experimented with already at Eretria. So he retained an archaeological interest. He probably taught archaeological material, but he didn't become what we would call an archaeologist in the sense of it wasn't the primary focus of his teaching, and he did not again go on an archaeological expedition. Well, John, this has been a great chat. I've got to start wrapping up now as we're nearing the end of our 40 minutes. But what would you say, having researched this figure of John Wesley Gilbert, what really is his influence and his legacy on the field of, on the one hand, classics and also, of course, archaeology?

Gilbert, if you want to think about him as a pioneer, a pioneer amongst African-American scholars, but also a pioneer amongst Americans of any race, any background, any ethnicity going to Greece, he is significant as an example of that first generation who kind of laid the groundwork for the enterprise of American archaeology in Greece. And to that, I would add that archaeology was a very important part of his life. I mentioned those artifacts. Clearly, it was part of his life even in his later years. But it was just one part of his, you know, he had a very wide-ranging life. He was a leader in his church. He was a leader in the civil rights movement in Georgia. He went to the Belgian Congo as a missionary in an interracial mission. He was a

father of four children. I mean, he had a very rich life that was grounded in this Greek experience, classical languages, and of traveling abroad. So, you know, he stands for us as kind of an inspiring, not kind of, a truly inspiring example of someone who, you know, was not expected to go anywhere, right? Who was not given the resources, but was able through his own hard work and with the help and mentoring of others to reach the heights of American education. So when we look for figures in our history to inspire us, I think Gilbert is just very, very inspiring in that sense of someone who came from very low and was able to make it to the heights. And no matter who you are, I think that the story really is a really a very inspiring one. I think you're quite right indeed. Well, John, this has been an absolutely brilliant chat. Last

but certainly not least, you've written a book all about this figure, which is called? The title of my book is The First Black Archaeologist, A Life of John Wesley Gilbert. Oxford University Press published it just in 2022. And if I may add that any royalties that I might receive from this book go to help support Payne College and also the William Sanders Scarborough Fund of the American School, which is meant to honor Professor Scarborough's legacy because unlike Gilbert, he never got to go to Greece. Well, fantastic. Well, John, this has been great. And it just goes to me to say thank you so much

for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Thank you, Tristan. It's really been a pleasure. Well, there you go. There was Dr. John Lee talking you through the extraordinary life of archaeologist John Wesley Gilbert. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Now, last things from me,

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