A Corrupt Cycladic Corpus of Marble Figures
Christos Tsirogiannis, David Gill, Christopher Chippindale · Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology & Heritage Studies · 2025
ABSTRACT The urgent seeking for Cycladic figures since the nineteenth century has caused significant destruction of the archaeological record and serious corruption of the corpus of knowledge. Unsurprisingly, there is little prospect of this corruption ever being understood in detail due to the lack of records. The problem proves impossible, as the loss of knowledge cannot now be undone. To address this issue, we examined the contribution to knowledge of collections based in universities (The Ashmolean and the Fitzwilliam), public museums (The J. Paul Getty Museum), and a private collection (Leonard N. Stern). By examining how these Cycladic figures’ collections were historically formed, we understood that they can add nothing to our knowledge of the Early Bronze Age in the Aegean. Therefore, we divided the collected corpus into four distinct parts, suggesting sensible and practical guidelines for the future by which we can salvage some trustworthy understanding from a corrupted mess.