College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Jars of clay

Two national grants will help Peggy Mook complete a study on the Greek Island of Crete.

Peggy Mook says an archeologist can expect to complete only three major projects in their career.

Her first one is nearing completion and the assistant professor of foreign languages and literature has received a pair of national grants this spring to help her along the way.

The grants arrived just in time. Mook hopes to begin that second major project in the year 2002.

But enough about the future. Mook is working in the past -- the very distant past. Beginning in 1987 while she was a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota, Mook was part of an excavation team that was working on a village on the Greek Island of Crete. For five years, the group, which also included team members from the University of Tennessee and Wabash University of Indiana, exposed and completed restoration of the architectural remains of the village.

Since that time the artifacts found during the dig have been stored away in Greece. Mook has returned numerous times to continue her research, including the 1997-98 academic year during a faculty improvement leave. She plans to return again this summer to Crete after receiving a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.

Then in the spring of 2001, Mook will again go back to Crete courtesy of a grant from the American Philosophical Society.

Both grants will enable her to complete her book, The Kastro: The Late Minoan IIIC through Orientalizing Pottery, which will be accompanied by a CD-ROM. This study will provide a complete ceramic chronology for the end of the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200-650 BC) in eastern Crete. Mook's analysis of the pottery will elucidate aspects of regional pottery production and consumption, provide evidence for the nature of daily life, and indicate social and economic variation across the settlement and through time.

"This increased understanding of regional cultural trends in Crete will contribute to our understanding of the Early Iron Age in the rest of Greece," Mook says, "and help scholars explicate the broader archaeological context of both the demise of the preceding Bronze Age civilization and the subsequent development of the early Greek city-states."

Though she says she's trained as a classicist, Mook has gravitated to archaeology since her doctoral studies in Minnesota.

"I'm interested in where we (man) came from and the evolution of human civilization," she said.

Since the mid-'80s she estimates she has looked at hundreds of thousands of pieces of pottery, many from the Crete site. Those experiences will continue this summer.

"I'll spend this summer and a portion of next spring processing pottery," she said. "Crete is a really good place to do this type of study because it's so geologically diverse."

At ISU, Mook teaches Latin, the classics, mythology, and Greek and Roman archaeology. She has sponsored two study abroad tours to Greece with a third planned in the summer of 2001.

The summer after that she hopes to be back in Greece working on the second major project of her academic career. Mook and a colleague from the University of North Carolina have submitted a request for a new archaeology dig to the Greek government.

If the request is granted, Mook expects work to begin in 2002. Excavation should take five seasons followed by five more years of study. She says there is even the possibility that ISU students will be provided opportunities to work on the excavation site.

"It's a big commitment. By the time I'm through with that project the next one should take me up to retirement," she laughs.