Machteld J. Mellink, 88, Archaeologist, Dies
from the NY Times
Machteld J. Mellink, an archaeologist and authority on ancient sites in Turkey, who became a forceful voice for ending the international trafficking of looted antiquities, died on Feb. 23 in an assisted-living home in Haverford, Pa. She was 88.
Dr. Mellink’s death was announced by Bryn Mawr College, where she taught in the department of classical and Near Eastern archaeology for five decades.
In scholarship that bridged Greek and eastern Mediterranean cultures, Dr. Mellink helped excavate sites in central and southeastern Turkey and reported on archaeological finds throughout the country, in the wider region known as Anatolia.
In the 1960’s, she was an early explorer of the Elmali plain, where she and others unearthed two tombs with vivid interior paintings of hunting and domestic scenes that have been dated to the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. The rich finds of the area quickly became targets of looters, prompting Dr. Mellink to plead for a halt to a “subversive assault upon the antiquities of Anatolia by ignorance and greed.”
In 1968, she wrote in The American Journal of Archaeology, “International legal action is needed because technical progress and the ‘archaeology explosion’ will destroy a major part of the ancient record in a frightening tempo.”
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