Hetty Goldman’s Work

Hetty Goldman at Halai, circa 1912 Photo Bryn Mawr College Library

Hetty Goldman’s dedication to archaeology began with excavation. Many significant artifacts were discovered under her direction. In the beginning of her career, the excavation of more than 280 graves near Halai allowed her to establish a clear chronology for the style of terracotta figures in the area. The brief excavation in Colophon revealed some of the earliest known Greek houses, a drainage system of terracotta pipes below the ancient streets, and, most intriguing, a tomb with pottery of a late-Minoan design. The Tarsus excavation uncovered a miniature crystal statue of a fine and unusual Hittite design, as well as bilingual treaties and seals that demonstrated the history of the city’s rulers and written language.

However, Goldman’s most significant contributions to archaeology came from her skills as a strategist and analyst. Her approach to excavation was thorough and yet efficient, always with the goal of tracing the complete history of a site. Some area was always left untouched so that it might be checked later. Each of her sites was selected with care, not to yield dramatic finds from famous monuments, but to reveal the richest possible slice of the cultural existence of ancient peoples.

Hetty Goldman Photo Bryn Mawr College Library

Goldman became increasingly interested in the prehistorical period and in the mutual influence of diverse cultures on one another. The Tarsus site, known as Gözlü Kule, was chosen as a point at which many cultures, including the Hittite, the Mycenaean, and the Syrian, may have come together. This was verified by the excavation’s findings. In the first year of work, Goldman reported that the goal of many archaeologists to find a site where Hittite and Greek cultures came together “has now actually been fulfilled by our work at Tarsus. For we found this year a sealed deposit in which there were both Hittite royal seals, a Hittite royal deed and Mycenaean pottery, much of which was imported from the Greek mainland.”

Goldman was generally quick to publish interim reports during excavations, and she compiled final publications that became invaluable tools to other archaeologists and historians. In her writing, she demonstrated a striking ability to look deeply into archaeological fragments and draw from them a story about their role and the societal forces at play in their creation.

The three volumes Goldman published on the Tarsus excavation were among the most thorough to date, with rich, poetic analyses of the findings. A remnant of a terracotta representation of a mythological character is described in the catalogue as having a “furrowed forehead, wide-eyed, anxious look, lined face, iris and pupil hollowed.” The description goes on to argue that the figure portrays an actor wearing a mask, “one of those with closed mouth and great beauty of countenance such as Lucian describes in his eulogy of the pantomimic dance. . . . The eyes, instead of being small, narrow and with only slight or no indication of the iris, are wide open with deep concave iris such as might very well represent the hollow eyes of a mask. Then, too, the tragic tension in the face is favorable to the idea of a mask, for it is in striking contrast both to the suave Augustan style and to the exaggeration of Anatolian caricature.”

Grotesque and realistic terracotta figurines discovered at Tarsus. "Old age with its fallen eyelids and pendulous, glabrous lips is given to the life in Nos. 327 and 337," Goldman wrote in Excavations at Gözlü Kule, Tarsus I (Princeton University Press, 1950)

Goldman’s introduction to the terracotta findings goes into broader interpretation as well, seeing in certain realistic and grotesque faces representing deformity and old age the response of Greeks coming for the first time to the crowded cities of Asia Minor. “The contrast between rich and poor, slave and free, was more striking than in earlier and simpler days, when pessimism, freely expressed by poet and sage, was philosophic and embodied in aphorisms of general application,” she writes. “The world stood upon the threshold of Christianity, and in the eastern Mediterranean, where it was born, there was an immense awareness of the sufferings and the tragic fate not only of man, but of individual men.” As Goldman’s colleague George M. A. Hanfmann pointed out, this passage brings to mind Goldman’s own visceral experiences with suffering people in the Balkan Wars and after the First World War.

It also serves to underline the assessment of Homer Thompson, who succeeded Herzfeld and Goldman at the Institute and who gave high visibility to archaeology as Director of the Agora excavations in Athens. “She was not interested primarily in finding beautiful objects,” Thompson said of Goldman. “Nor yet in accumulating masses of archaeological data for their own sake. Her purpose was to learn all that the soil could be made to tell about the history of an ancient settlement, of how its inhabitants lived, and of what they thought and felt.”

Life | Work | Legacy | References