J. Alexander MacGillivray

I have always been obsessed with history and storytelling (same thing really). Add artifacts and you get archaeology - finding the tangible clues to make your stories believable. After all, aren't true stories always more compelling? I've been lifting historical clues from the ground since I found old bottles in my mother's deep rose beds alongside our St Lambert, Québec yard in the 1960s. Then, slides of Knossos projected onto a wall at Montreal's Dawson College in 1970 triggered a longing to discover my connection to that strange Cretan civilization, the Minoans. They built huge, sumptuous palaces filled with rich art then vanished into myth, remembered only in Greek tales of the evil emperor Minos who fed young Athenian nobles to his Minotaur in Daedalus's labyrinth until his own daughter Ariadne helped Theseus slay the beast and escape. Totally hooked, I studied ancient history and classics at McGill University and then focused on the Minoans for my PhD at Edinburgh University. In 1979 I was initiated to the tense thrill of delivering ancient artifactsfrom the ground, like some tireless midwife, with a British team at Knossos. In 1980 I worked at Sparta and since 1983 have co-directed a series of British excavations at the Minoan town and sanctuary site at Palaikastro in eastern Crete. From 1988 to 1997 I discovered the buzz of sharing my enthusiasm for history and archaeology with bright and eager young minds at Columbia University in New York. Now, much of my time is devoted to writing up the amazing things we've found at Palaikastro. But thirty years of digging up antiquities has shown me the other, less familiar side of archaeology; how we actively create what we find, strange as it sounds. My first foray into exposing how this works is Minotaur, in which I examine how Sir Arthur Evans created the Minoans. Next, I look at myself.