The Puzzle of the Past
Piecing together the ancient sacred architecture of the Acropolis
A handful of years after Indiana Jones inspired a new generation of adventure-driven archaeologists, Nancy Klein was a young college student in Greece, excavating ancient settlements.
“You’re digging in the ground, and you find something that is hundreds or thousands of years old,” said Klein, now a Texas A&M associate professor of architecture. “One of the most common things we find is pottery. You realize as you’re holding it that it was made by a human, and the connection you feel is striking and tangible.”
Pottery, she said, is amazing because it’s handmade and virtually unbreakable, so you can often find finger or thumbprints perfectly preserved within the clay.
“There’s this thing you just can’t resist doing,” she said. “Everybody always puts their fingers in the print to see if it fits. Do I fit? Do I have something in common with this person from so long ago? Touching something like that instantly connects you.”
Asking architecture
As a classical archaeologist and architectural historian, things intentionally designed and built by human hands to last, like temples and monuments, and how they evolved with people’s needs, fascinate Klein.
“It doesn’t matter if you spent a dollar or billions to build it, architecture speaks to your concerns, your community and your cultural priorities,” she said. “In my architecture history classes, we talk about ‘interrogating’ architecture as a way of understanding the people who built it. If they didn’t leave us written sources, the artifacts and architecture are really our best source for asking questions.”
Ancient history
“What were you before?” is the question Klein asks in her current project, which is nearly complete after almost two decades of work.
She has spent thousands of hours deep in an Acropolis storeroom studying stone architectural fragments from the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. in an attempt to understand the architectural history of the Acropolis.
“Most people are familiar with the Parthenon, this majestic temple on the Acropolis that dates back to the 5th century B.C.,” Klein said. “It figures very large in our understanding and appreciation of Greek culture because it survives. But before that temple was built, there was a sanctuary on the Acropolis that began about 150 years before the Parthenon.”
Klein said the real beginnings of monumental architecture in Athens started on the Acropolis, where the Athenians built temples and a variety of sanctuary structures to honor their patron goddess Athena.
“The reason we don’t know much about these is because in the 6th century B.C., the Greeks began a series of battles against the Persians,” Klein said. “They fought an important battle, the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., where they defeated the Persian army, which was unheard of. If you’ve seen the movie ‘300’ you know that the Persians were this seemingly invincible force. But the Greeks won.”
Klein said the Greeks took the riches left by the Persians and tore down one of their own temples to build a newer, bigger one. But then just ten years later, in 480 B.C. the Persians returned and defeated the Greeks. In revenge for their earlier defeat, the Persians burned and destroyed all the sanctuaries on the Acropolis.
Later, when the Greeks defeated the Persians again, they rebuilt on the ruins of their previous temples, reusing what they could and burying the rest in the ground to honor their history.
“They built into the fabric, the foundations and the walls, objects from earlier buildings,” Klein said. “Then they built the Parthenon and all the beautiful structures that remain today.”
Lost and found
Fast forward to the 19th century: Greece gained its independence from the Ottoman Empire and made the Acropolis the symbol of their new nation. They began removing older, non-classical Greek remains and excavated down to the bedrock, finding all these old sculptures and pieces of architecture buried in the 5th century B.C.
“It made international headlines,” Klein said. “People were amazed as they pulled up these marble statues of women who still had vivid paint on them because they were buried after only a couple of decades. Those are now in the Acropolis Museum.”
Klein said some of the architecture that was unearthed is on display, but much of what was uncovered — thousands of stone blocks and fragments — is in storage.
“I describe this project to people like if someone threw dozens of puzzle boxes full of pieces on the ground and then threw out the box lids with the pictures on them,” she said. “Well if you know that one is a picture of a garden and one is of a house; you can start separating them out.”
Detective work
She describes her approach to processing the blocks as “mind-numbingly slow.” It involves inspecting each piece to observe the size, characteristics and dimensions, calculating scale from known Greek architecture and using her knowledge of what type of features buildings from different eras had, and other innovative approaches to document and interpret the fragments to recreate the buildings.
“Remember, we probably lost a couple pieces when vacuuming the floor, so we don’t have the whole thing,” joked Klein. “But we have enough.”
Supported at Texas A&M with funding from the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, the Department of Architecture, and external grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, she’s traveled annually to Greece, with an exception during COVID-19 in 2020-2022, to continue her work.
Klein said she has to navigate a complex permit system every time she goes to Greece to conduct her research and has to be monitored while in the Acropolis storerooms as a foreign scholar at work. Combined with the meticulous task of individually measuring, inspecting and attempting to fit pieces together, that’s why the research has taken so long.
“I have to take the fragments and make a compelling argument for how they go together and then fit in to the building to which they probably belong,” Klein said. “I also have to make sure that I’m reassembling the building in a way that allows other scholars of architecture to follow my line of reasoning and the evidence that I have to support it. I then create the reconstructions.”
The final product
Klein is combining her discoveries and research into a single-author book currently set to be completed in 2023-24 that’s tentatively titled “The Architecture of the Acropolis before the Parthenon.”
“In addition to the history of pre-Parthenon monuments, it will cover the early foundations of architecture and the exploratory steps and experiments taken in early monumental stone buildings,” Klein said.
Meant to serve as a primary and functional contribution to Greek architectural history, it will also explore ancient Greek religion and the history of scholarship, building on the work of earlier generations, she said.
“I think anyone who is interested in those subjects will be able to pick up the book and find a new understanding that isn’t possible without this work,” Klein said.
Once it’s published, Klein says she has dozens of other architectural research projects waiting in the wings to pursue.
“I’m not sure I have another 20-year research project in my future just in terms of complexity,” Klein said. “But as you’re researching one topic, you end up reading widely and find a lot of things that catch your attention. You have to tell yourself not to fall down the rabbit hole. But I’m looking forward to following up on some things I wanted to explore further.”
