Ione Mylonas Shear

Ione Mylonas Shear (; February 19, 1936January 15, 2005) was an American archaeologist who specialized in the domestic spaces of Mycenaean Greece. She was the daughter of George E. Mylonas, a Greek-born archaeologist teaching in the United States. Ione Mylonas was educated at Wellesley College and undertook graduate study in archaeology at Bryn Mawr College and at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA). She excavated under her father at Eleusis, at Isthmia in central Greece, and at Morgantina on Sicily. At Eleusis, she met the archaeologist , whom she married in 1959.

Shear's publications included works on ancient Greek art and the Acropolis of Athens in addition to her primary field of Mycenaean archaeology. She published three monographs, including two in which she argued that the Homeric poems (the ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey'') were accurate reflections of the world of Bronze Age Greece. These beliefs, which she shared with her father, were generally rejected as outdated.

Biography

Ione Mylonas was the daughter of the Greek archaeologist George E. Mylonas and his wife, Lena (). She was born on February 19, 1936, in Champaign, Illinois, and grew up in St. Louis, where her father was a professor at the Washington University. She was then educated at Wellesley College, a women's college in Massachusetts, before undertaking graduate study in archaeology at Bryn Mawr College, another women's college in Pennsylvania, and spent the 1959–1960 academic year at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA). Her doctoral dissertation, ''Mycenaean Domestic Architecture'', was published in 1968. In her early career, she excavated at Eleusis in Attica, where her father was director, and at Isthmia, and in Sicily at Morgantina. At Isthmia in 1960, she supervised the excavation of human remains found in the so-called "Theater Cave".

She met the American archaeologist in 1956 when they were both excavating at Eleusis. The two married in 1959; they had two daughters, one of whom, Julia Shear, also became an archaeologist. Ione Shear joined the ASCSA's excavations of the Ancient Agora of Athens in 1967, and remained on the project until 1975. She returned to the excavations in 1979, and worked as a supervisor there until 1993. In 1981, she supervised with Margaret Miles the excavation of the Stoa Poikile. She published ''The Panagia Houses of Mycenae'' in 1987, in which she coined the term "three-room unit" to refer to the basic domestic structure common in Mycenaean archaeology.

In 2000, Shear published ''Tales of the Heroes: The Origins of the Homeric Texts'', in which she argued that the ''Iliad'' and ''Odyssey'' had their origins in the Mycenaean Bronze Age but were definitively composed through oral dictation in sixth-century Athens. Reviewing the work in the ''Bryn Mawr Classical Review'', Jonathan Burgess considered the argument creative but ultimately unconvincing, partly due to Shear's reliance on then-outdated hypotheses such as Spyridon Marinatos's conjecture that the Bronze Age volcanic eruption of Santorini was reflected in the later story of Atlantis, and partly due to her limited engagement with more recent scholarly approaches to the question of the poems' origins. Stephanie West, in ''The Classical Review'', called its argument "more ingenious than persuasive".

She followed this in 2004 with ''Kingship in the Mycenaean World and Its Reflections in the Oral Tradition'', which aimed to demonstrate, contrary to mainstream scholarly opinion but in line with the views of her father (to whom she dedicated the book), that the Homeric poems represent an accurate portrayal of the Late Bronze Age world. In the ''American Journal of Archaeology'', Erwin Cook rejected this argument as relying on special pleading, selecting examples from archaeology and within the Homeric poems which supported it and ignoring those which did not. , in , similarly rejected the argument for ignoring too many discrepancies between the poems and the archaeological record, while James Whitley, in ''The Classical Review'', criticized Shear for misunderstanding previous approaches to the problem (particularly that of Moses Finley) and ignoring more recent ones, particularly that of Anthony Snodgrass; John Bennet called Shear's views "extreme". Victor Parker, in ''Gnomon'', considered Shear's thesis broadly correct, disagreeing only in what he considered to be points of detail.

Shear was a life member of the Archaeological Institute of America. She died on January 15, 2005, of cancer, at the University Medical Center in Princeton, and was buried in Princeton Cemetery. A fellowship in her name was established at the ASCSA: as of 2019, this offered graduate students a stipend of $11,500 and accommodation at the school to study Mycenaean or Athenian archaeology.

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Shear, Ione Mylonas
1936 births
2005 deaths
20th-century American archaeologists
Bryn Mawr College alumni
Mycenaean archaeologists
Wellesley College alumni