Cults and Rites in Ancient Greece

Michael H. Jameson received his BA in Greek from the University of Chicago at the age of seventeen. After serving in the US Navy, he returned to the University of Chicago where he earned his PhD in 1949, with a dissertation on 'The Offering at Meals: Its Place in Greek Sacrifice'. He spent 1949-50 at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens with a Fulbright Fellowship. After three years at the University of Minnesota, he accepted a Ford Fellowship at the Institute for Social Anthropology at Oxford University in 1953-4. In 1954 he became Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania, and later director of the Graduate Group in Ancient History until 1976. In that year he was appointed Professor of Classics at Stanford University; in 1977 he became Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies, a position he held until his death in August 2004. Throughout his long career he received numerous awards and visiting fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1966-7). He wrote over sixty articles on the political, ecological and social aspects of the practice of religion in the ancient Greek polis. As an epigrapher he published many inscriptions in Inscriptiones Graecae. As an archaeologist he began the excavation of Halieis in 1962, and was a director and organizer of the Argolid Exploration Project, an archaeological, ecological and ethnographic survey during the period 1979-83, which resulted in numerous publications, especially A Greek Countryside: The Southern Argolid from Prehistory to the Present Day (1994), co-authored with Tjeerd Van Andel and C. N. Runnels. His teaching and example inspired a generation of scholars. Allaire B. Stallsmith, now Associate Professor of History at Towson University in Towson, MD, wrote her PhD dissertation under the direction of Michael H. Jameson. Her research interests include ancient Greek religion, especially the cult of Demeter, as well as the ethnoarchaeology of the Greek countryside. Her publications include 'One Colony, Two Mother Cities: Cretan Agriculture under Venetian and Ottoman Rule', in J. Davis and S. Davies (eds.) Between Venice and Istanbul: Colonial Landscapes in Early Modern Greece, Hesperia Supplement 40, 2007, and (as Allaire Brumfield) The Attic Festivals of Demeter and their Relation to the Agricultural Year, New York (Arno Press 1981). She is currently writing a longer study of Demeter Thesmophoros and the Thesmophoria.