Talk:University of Minnesota Messenia Expedition/GA1

GA Review
The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.''

Reviewer: Kusma (talk · contribs) 19:34, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Will review this, should not take longer than a few days at most. —Kusma (talk) 19:34, 11 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Thank you! UndercoverClassicist (talk) 11:40, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for all your comments here. There's clearly a mix of quick fixes and more substantial things: I'll chew my way through them, adding replies as I go, and put another message on here when I think it's ready for another 'proper' look. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 16:27, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Sure. Please take your time, and don't put too much into the "seven days" bit of the "on hold" message. I'll do another detailed read-through when you say you're ready. —Kusma (talk) 10:32, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Ready when you are: I haven't yet reworked the image, but that's to-do (and really outside the scope of GAN proper, though I appreciate the pointer as a means of improving the article). The large quotation remains in place: I've explained below why I still think it has a place in the article, but would be keen for your thoughts on exactly what that place might be. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 14:57, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Just checking in to say I've seen this, but I've been busy in real life. I will attend to this soon, but I can't promise it will be today. —Kusma (talk) 09:35, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Please don't rush: you've been very patient with me, and I'm more than prepared to extend the same courtesy in return. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 15:16, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Did a skim through the newest version (and made two edits, one that I'm certain about and another one that is more experimental). It is quite nice now. There are a few more things left to do but I think nothing major jumped out at me. —Kusma (talk) 20:19, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Good changes, I think it is good enough now (you could give the Linear B in actual Linear B like at Knossos, but that is certainly optional). Thank you for contributing this nice article! —Kusma (talk) 08:02, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

Section by section prose and content review
New comments from me:
 * Lead: Seems a bit short and doesn't fully summarise the article. Nothing about the animal bones, for example. I would suggest to expand by 50-100%.
 * Expanded. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 14:55, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Length is fine now. I am not so happy with "The project had its origins" contrasted with "The project had its roots" a few sentences later; what is the difference between roots and origins here? —Kusma (talk) 20:15, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I was trying to draw a contrast between the broad academic background that spawned it - the decipherment of LB - and the embryonic stages of the project itself. Reworked a little better, I think. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 21:43, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Background and rationale: there seems to be a fascinating background story here with Linear B being deciphered at the time, but I think you're not presenting it in the best way. We're jumping forward and backward in time and also between personal motivation and the state of Mycenaean archaeology at the time. It would also be great to introduce a bit who the main actors are (who are Blegen and McDonald and do they have any connection to Minnesota? Do any of the others have connections to Minnesota?) In my non-expert view (please tell me off if I am too wrong) it would be easier to read to first tell us what the situation was concerning excavations in the area before 1950, then who in Minnesota was interested in the area and why, and then tell us what happened with Linear B in the 1950s (try to be a bit more chronological?) There may be better ways to untangle this, but I think you should try.
 * It's a tricky one. McDonald was at Minnesota; Blegen was at Cincinnati. In the early years, this project is entirely McDonald work and Blegen's idea; Blegen essentially suggests it to McDonald in light of the work happening on the deciphered Linear B documents, which give a (fairly) detailed picture of a Mycenaean state based in Pylos with all sorts of outlying towns and villages, all located... well, nobody's quite sure. The University of Minnesota itself isn't really part of the story until 1961. I'm working on this section at the moment, and have made some changes to tie the threads together a little. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 16:27, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * It reads a lot better now. Can you break up the long sentence starting "Ventris' translation of this tablet"? —Kusma (talk) 20:15, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Done. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 21:31, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Is it Palace of Nestor or 'Palace of Nestor'? Or even "Palace of Nestor" per MOS:"?
 * Generally, Palace of Nestor like Houses of Parliament, though on first mention I've gone for {{tq|so-called "Palace of Nestor"). It's perhaps a little outside the scope of the article, but there's no connection except Romantic wishful thinking between the place and the Homeric Nestor. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 16:27, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * McDonald's first surveys (1953–1959): could you introduce this a bit more? I am not sure that the quote is such a great way to start the section. Who is Wace?
 * I think it's a great summary of what McDonald and Hope Simpson thought they were doing, and the general frame of mind with which they did it: perhaps not the best thing to put first, though. Wace is another big name in Mycenaean archaeology - along with Blegen, really one of the two giants of Anglo-American Mycenaean archaeology in the first half of the 20th century. and so in McDonald's eyes emblematic of the old-school, pre-theoretical, 'common sense' school of archaeology. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 16:27, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Quote is still there, though that's largely because I can't think of a better place to put it. Grateful for your thoughts. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:47, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
 * How about a separate box? (Tried something, feel free to change/tweak/revert). I really don't like that there is no introduction to the section before the quote. —Kusma (talk) 20:15, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I think it works now; I've cut and moved other images to reduce the knock-on sandwich problems. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 21:32, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * What is the LH IIIB period?
 * Explained and cited in text. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 16:27, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * But you have now also used LH IIIC without saying how long that was. —Kusma (talk) 20:15, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Now explained in the same way on first use. I've included a whole table in other Mycenaean articles; I think that might be overkill here, since we're only really using LH IIIB and LH IIIC, and it's not all that important to know anything except that C comes after B. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 21:33, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Do we know anything about funding (other than the short Guggenheim grant) and about permissions by the Greek?
 * I don't offhand. I'll have a look back through some of the publications and see if I can find something: it's usual to acknowledge funding sources there. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 22:00, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Found and added. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 15:11, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * "with whom he developed the surveying methods that would characterise the project over its duration", "Many of the defining characteristics of the UMME had their origins in this period" could you perhaps write more about what these characteristic surveying methods and defining characteristics are? Your focus seems to be on who said what about these methods and what they should be called; I'd rather hear about what the methods were.
 * I think this is now addressed. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 18:58, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * "The University of Minnesota Messenia Expedition (1961–1968)" now I am confused. So it is called the UMME only in this time period? Then the "first surveys" are kind of background? Or do other people describe the whole thing (1953-1975) as UMME? Please clarify.
 * The UMME label gets applied to the whole thing with retrospect; the early surveys are very recognisably the same project, just with fewer people. It wasn't used before 1961, because the University of Minnesota itself had no real involvement. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 16:27, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Generally this section is much easier to read than the previous ones. All new people are properly introduced, for example.
 * "a figure McDonald reaffirmed in 1979 article" is it an article or have you mentioned it before and can say the?
 * Typo; fixed. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 16:27, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The excavation of Nichoria (1969–1975): "McDonald saw the excavation of Nichoria as the second phase of the Minnesota expedition" did anybody else agree? Or should Nichoria be excavated in a separate article?
 * Nichoria's publication makes clear that it's conceptualised as part of the UMME project (essentially, the initial survey phase is large-scale, fast-moving and a little loose on precise data; the Nichoria dig complements that by being small-scale, fixed in place and obsessively precise about data), and indeed the tholos tomb there is still known as the 'UMME' or 'MME' tomb. It's already got a separate article, which is hatnoted, but certainly belongs here as well. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 16:27, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * "Attempts were also made to carbon-date some of the remains, which helped to indicate some of the limitations of the use of this technique in the Aegean region." Not totally sure I follow. They didn't manage to carbon-date anything in Messenia and by that learned that carbon dating in the Aegean was also hard?
 * Basically; it's a long story, but the issue is that carbon-dating in the Aegean often gives you crazy results because multiple different ages present in the same way. So they come into Nichoria all optimistic about this wonderful new technique (which had borne fruit elsewhere in the region, or at least been used confidently), get results that make absolutely no sense, and so raise a red flag that is now generally pretty axiomatic among people in the field (and, incidentally, the core of its biggest scholarly disagreement, which is how you go about putting a solid date on anything).
 * I've now gone in and added a footnote + citation explaining, in outline, the problem. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Notable participants: who are all these people? (I'd assume the default is "University of Minnesota archaeology faculty or PhD students").
 * Crudely, archaeologists famous enough for a Wikipedia article who worked on the project. Mostly McDonald, Hope Simpson, their colleagues, their friends, their students and other big names who happened to be passing. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 16:27, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Legacy: Who is John Cherry and why do we care about his opinion?
 * He's now introduced further up. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 18:58, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * "providing evidence against the totality of the Late Bronze Age collapse"/"Dorian invasion": so what are the theories refuted here?
 * I've reworked this bit; tricky to know how much to explain without going into a whole new article on the (many, complicated, controversial) theories for exactly what happened c.1180 BCE. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 18:58, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * "'MME' tholos" what does MME stand for? And shouldn't these be double quotes or is this one of the exceptions in MOS:"?
 * MME = Minnesota Messenia Expedition. Both get used for the project; UMME is the abbreviation that the project gave itself in its publications, though MME is also common, particularly when being a little less formal. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 15:10, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The animal bones from Nichoria: "The project's interest in zooarchaeology and the recovery of animal bones made Nichoria into an important site for the diets of people in Mycenaean and Iron Age Greece." Was it the interest or the recovery? And do you mean the study of these diets?
 * Who are Robert Sloan and Maria Duncan? Same for the other names in the subsection.
 * So what is the state of the art of the research into these animal bones? Is the "pastoral hypothesis" (I think it looks better with ") confirmed or not?
 * It's still debated, at least as far as published sources are concerned. In reality, Dibble and co. have pretty solidly demolished it (or at least any possibility of using the Nichoria bones to argue for it, which was a pretty fundamental part of its evidence base to begin with), but they're still early-career researchers and their argument hasn't yet made it into major published narratives on the period, in part because there aren't very many of those being written. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 22:04, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Now expanded a bit, thanks to a rather lucky find of Foxhall. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Bibliography: ISBNs or Worldcat (OCLC) links for the books would be nice
 * Done, I think. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Still missing in the "Publications of the UMME" subsection. —Kusma (talk) 20:15, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * You are quite right - now corrected. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 21:39, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
 * "The methods of the survey expanded to reflect its increasingly interdisciplinary nature." Hmm. I think I don't like the "to reflect"; they had people from more disciplines so they used a wider variety of methods, but this didn't have the purpose of reflecting the interdisciplinary nature. We later also have "As the project progressed, its scale and disciplinary range increased", basically saying the same thing again.
 * "ephor" and "Greek Archaelogical Service" are duplinks. Late Bronze Age collapse is also linked twice; once directly, the second time piped.
 * All now fixed. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 21:41, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

General comments and GA criteria checkbox
This is an interesting article about a worthy topic (even if it could make clearer why the scope is as it is). It appears well researched and I haven't found indications of OR so far. It does read a bit uneven, though: the level of detail is varying quite a bit between sections, and the clarity and amount of explanations is also not the same everywhere. But I do think the article is broad enough in what it covers. I think the article will be much better with a bit of reorganisation and perhaps some tightening in places. I will do spot checks and look through images some other day. From the titles of works cited, it seems that just "Minnesota Messenia Expedition" is also a widely used name? —Kusma (talk) 22:30, 14 April 2023 (UTC)

Images: Notes: Other works cited: Spotchecks: the tablets before an attempt is made to locate any of the names on a map. This is of course a desperately difficult undertaking; our records are far too scanty and imprecise to yield wholly satisfactory results." UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2023 (UTC) OK, I think I'm done here. Sourcing/paraphrasing is generally OK with some question marks, but certainly the sources are reliable and scholarly. —Kusma (talk) 14:31, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Is the map entirely your work? (including the topography) or did you get that from elsewhere? It is a nice map. Only the 900m elevation and the sea are both "transparent", which perhaps isn't ideal; I would suggest to change the 900m one to white or even a slight off-white.
 * It is my own work (barring the underlying data). I'll have a look at that when I get the chance; I think those colours are a relic of the move from QGIS to Inkscape. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 18:58, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Captions shouldn't end with a period unless they are a full sentence.
 * Done: I'm not 100% sure how to handle fragment-sentence captions (e.g. "Picture of a man. He has a beard.") I've gone with two full stops, though I can see the argument that the whole thing is ungrammatical. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
 * File:112Alpheos rivier.jpg doesn't seem to add super much
 * Axed. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
 * File:Nichoria archaeological site.jpg could use upright
 * Now has it. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Licensing seems fine (only possible question is the legality of publishing photographs from inside Greek museums, like File:Tablet with Linear B Script from Pylos, Messenia - 13 cent. BC.jpg, but I am not in the mood for that headache now).
 * a total of 1587 Linear B tablets are known from Pylos "from Pylos are known" sounds better?
 * Now reads as such. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 18:58, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Études Topographiques sur la Messinie Ancienne would like a publisher (or is it a dissertation?), ideally some sort of ID like OCLC and a fr if it is in French
 * Now sorted. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Formatting is generally fine. At FAC, they would tell you to either link or unlink all of your placenames and publishers.
 * I think this is now sorted. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
 * 9: could not find
 * I've expanded the page range to 125-126: Chadwick here is talking about the value of the UMME's nascent work in helping to join the tablets with geography. See especially the quotation on p126: "All possible geographical information should be wrung from
 * 15: It is called "The catalogue of the ships in Homer's Iliad",.
 * Corrected. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
 * 22: checks out.
 * 44a: checks out.
 * 47: checks out once you figure out "EH I" etc. all means "Early Helladic".
 * 57: quote is slightly different in Davis
 * The precise quotation is from Dibble, though Davis is saying the same thing, in more detail but less quotably. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
 * 58: I don't see the UMME explicitly mentioned as "inspiration", it more seems to be a chronological thing than a direct connection.
 * Fair point: now "It was the first of numerous regional landscape surveys in Greece" UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2023 (UTC)
 * 59: "My own interest in the kingdom was provoked by a desire to move beyond McDonald and Hope Simpson’s approaches to surface archaeology and to gather fuller and more detailed information about the Mycenaean countryside than had been available to the participants in that conference." becomes "Jack Davis later cited the 1972 'Mycenaean Geography' conference at the University of Cambridge, centred on the results of the UMME, as the source of his interest in Messenia". His interest seems to come from the things not covered in that conference, so I'm not sure you're doing this sentence full justice.
 * Also fair; I've added a little to the end to clarify that (I think the preceding sentence does a little work in that direction too). UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2023 (UTC)


 * I'll put this on hold for now and will come back for a second pass once comments have been addressed. —Kusma (talk) 14:33, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
 * OK, I think we're somewhere closer to 'there'. Assuming I haven't missed anything off your list, happy for you to take another look. UndercoverClassicist (talk) 20:45, 18 April 2023 (UTC)