Knowra Carl Blegen Carl Blegen Carl Blegen (1887–1971) was an American archaeologist who excavated Troy and Pylos. His work clarified Troy’s Bronze Age settlement sequence and uncovered the Mycenaean palace archives at Pylos.
Troy : An ancient city in northwestern Anatolia, occupied for millennia and identified with the setting of the Iliad. Blegen’s excavations distinguished successive settlement layers and identified a likely Late Bronze Age citadel.
Stratigraphy : The study of layered deposits and their relative sequence in archaeology and geology. Blegen used Troy’s superimposed occupation levels to order its long history.
University of Cincinnati : A public research university in Cincinnati, Ohio, founded in 1819. Blegen studied and later taught there; its archaeological program supported his work at Troy and Pylos.
Konstantinos Kourouniotis : A Greek archaeologist who collaborated with Carl Blegen in excavating the Mycenaean palace at Pylos. Their Greek-American partnership joined local archaeological authority with Blegen’s excavation program.
Trojan War : A legendary conflict between Greeks and Trojans narrated in ancient Greek literature, especially Homer’s Iliad. Blegen’s identification of Troy VIIa as a possible setting linked archaeological destruction to the epic tradition.
Pylos : An ancient city in southwestern Greece, home to the Mycenaean palace at Ano Englianos. Blegen excavated its palace and helped reveal a major Mycenaean administrative center.
Archaeological context : The spatial and stratigraphic relationships that give an archaeological object evidence of its past use and deposition. Careful recording of find locations helped make Blegen’s excavations useful for reconstructing settlement phases.
Carl Blegen Library : A research library at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, named for the archaeologist Carl Blegen. Blegen’s career was closely tied to the American School, which sponsored his early Greek archaeological work.
Marion Rawson : An American archaeologist who worked with Carl Blegen at Pylos and helped publish the site’s excavation results. Rawson directed and documented substantial parts of the Pylos work, including the palace’s architectural remains.
Homeric archaeology : The study of archaeological evidence in relation to the people, places, and events represented in Homeric epic. Blegen’s Troy research helped define the debate over how archaeological evidence relates to the Iliad.
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