Panagiotis Stamatakis (; – 1885) (sometimes anglicised as Panayotis or Stamatakes) was a Greek archaeologist. He is noted particularly for his role in supervising the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae in 1876, and his role in recording and preserving the archaeological remains at the site.
Most of Stamatakis's early life is obscure: he was born in the village of Varvitsa in Laconia, and had no university education or formal archaeological training. He was hired as an employee of the Greek Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education in 1863, and recruited in 1866 as an assistant to Panagiotis Efstratiadis, the Ephor General of Antiquities leading the Greek Archaeological Service. Over the following two decades, Stamatakis travelled and excavated widely throughout Greece. His major role was as a travelling official, or "apostle", working variously for the Archaeological Service and the Archaeological Society of Athens: in this capacity, he investigated antiquities crimes and founded museum collections throughout Greece. He was particularly prolific in the region of Boeotia, where he excavated at Tanagra, at Chaeronea and Thespiai, and established the Archaeological Museum of Thebes.
Between 1876 and 1877, Stamatakis was deputised by Efstratiadis to represent the Greek government and the Archaeological Society at the excavations of Mycenae, which were being conducted by Heinrich Schliemann on the society's behalf. Both Stamatakis and Efstratiadis distrusted Schliemann's integrity, and Stamatakis frequently opposed Schliemann's methodology, which paid little attention to accurate record-keeping or to the preservation of cultural material Schliemann deemed uninteresting. After Schliemann's departure from Mycenae late in 1876, Stamatakis discovered additional tombs at the site, completed the excavation and organised the public exhibition of its finds.
Stamatakis was promoted to Ephor General in 1884. After his premature death in 1885, his work was largely forgotten, and most of his excavations remained unpublished. Modern reassessment of the excavations at Mycenae, fuelled in large part by the rediscovery in the early 21st century of Stamatakis's notebooks from the site, led in turn to a re-evaluation of his importance to the Mycenae excavations and to Greek archaeology: he has been described as "one of the great Greek archaeologists of the nineteenth century".
Life and career Panagiotis Stamatakis was born in the village of Varvitsa (now part of the municipality of Sparta) in Laconia; his father's name was Antonios. Almost nothing is known of Stamatakis's early life: he attended the demotic school of Varvitsa, which had only a single class of students, and took his graduation exams on . He had no university education, and appears to have been largely self-taught in archaeology. On , he became a secretary to the Greek Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education, which had oversight of the Greek Archaeological Service. He was sent to the island of Melos in October 1864, reporting to Panagiotis Efstratiadis, the Ephor General of Antiquities in charge of the Archaeological Service. On Melos, he met a tomb-robber surnamed Nostraki and moved a Roman-period stele excavated there by him to Athens, also transcribing its inscription. He secured two inscribed stelai for the state from a man named Ramvias, cutting each in half to be sent to Athens, as the complete objects were too heavy to transport. Stamatakis was due to return to Athens before , but stayed later, without Efstratiadis's permission, to continue his work. In November and December 1864, he bought several looted artefacts on Melos, including coins, works of statuary and pottery, and transferred them to Athens.
In January 1866, Stamatakis was hired as an assistant to Efstratiadis. Stamatakis was sent immediately to Sparta, where he reported on the discovery of an ancient statue that had been illegally excavated and concealed in a merchant's house. He was sworn in as a civil servant on . His primary task was to record antiquities held in private collections, and so to enable the Archaeological Service to gain an understanding of the number and condition of ancient finds unearthed to date. He joined the Archaeological Society of Athens, a learned society with a prominent role in the excavation and conservation of ancient monuments, on , but was excused paying its membership fees until 1871 on account of his limited finances.
In 1867, he oversaw excavations in Athens; in 1868, he began a lifelong campaign of travel to monitor excavations and antiquities crime throughout Greece, travelling to Thebes, Plataea and Chaeronea in Boeotia. Between 1870 and 1885, he was the only Greek archaeological official responsible for heritage protection outside Athens. During his early career, he seems to have had financial difficulties: he requested that his salary for August 1866 be paid to somebody by the name of Apostolos Verropoulos, possibly his creditor, and on he was sued by a creditor for an unpaid debt of fifty drachmas. On , his salary was temporarily confiscated by court order to pay a debt of 270 drachmas; shortly afterwards, on , Dimitrios Saravas, the minister responsible for the Archaeological Service, approved a payment of 50 drachmas to Stamatakis for "extraordinary service to the Archaeological Service".
In 1871, then working as an assistant in the Archaeological Office of the Ministry of Education, Stamatakis was invited by the Archaeological Society to become a travelling , known as an "apostle", for it. A major part of his role as an apostle was to persuade citizens to surrender illegally-excavated antiquities to the state. His energetic approach to these efforts, later described as "tireless in his work, unyielding in the discharge of his duties and unshakeable in the matters of ethics", led to the establishment of public archaeological collections throughout Greece, and the basis for many future archaeological museums, including those at Thebes, Chaeronea, Thespiai and Tanagra, the first such collections in Boeotia. In 1872, he was sent to Laconia to catalogue the antiquities in private collections there; this was the first time a professional archaeologist had worked in the region.
On , he was given the post of of the Peloponnese by the Archaeological Service, which was at that time expanding its ranks to include a number of such officers. The post carried a monthly salary of 250 drachmas. In the royal decree establishing his position, Stamatakis was also listed as a graduate student of the University of Athens, though he may have attended lectures there informally rather than being officially enrolled. By , he had been transferred to have responsibility for central Greece. During the same year, he established the Archaeological Museum of Sparta, building its collection largely from illegally-excavated artefacts recovered during his time in Laconia. He offered his resignation from the Archaeological Service on – according to Petrakos, for the fourth or fifth time – in protest at his treatment by his superiors, but had withdrawn it and returned to Athens by . He was promptly reassigned to Attica, where he was sent to to purchase inscriptions for the state; he made his report from there on .
During his career, Stamatakis travelled and excavated widely in Greece. He discovered and excavated a tomb at the site of the Heraion of Argos in May 1875, and his finds in Argos formed the basis for the early collection of the Archaeological Museum of Argos, opened in 1878. He campaigned in Boeotia against the illegal excavation and trade of antiquities from 1871 onwards, carrying out excavations in 1873–1875 at Tanagra following the illegal looting of the necropolis there in the early 1870s, where the looting of around 10,000 tombs had raised concerns about antiquities looting and smuggling among the Greek press and population. His excavations brought to light various funerary reliefs and inscriptions. He also worked in the Aegean islands, producing the first archaeological maps of Delos and Mykonos. From 1872 to 1873, he stayed on Delos to supervise the excavation of the French School at Athens at the sanctuary of Heracles, directed by J. Albert Lebègue.
Excavations at Mycenae, 1876–1877
Background to the excavations
The German archaeologist and businessman Heinrich Schliemann first visited Mycenae in 1868, and tried unsuccessfully to secure a permit to excavate there throughout the early 1870s. The permit to excavate at the site belonged to the Archaeological Society of Athens, and Schliemann wrote in January 1870 to Stefanos Koumanoudis, secretary of the society, offering to excavate the site on their behalf. In this letter, he expressed his belief that the royal tombs of Mycenae might be found within the citadel. However, Schliemann's letter of to Frank Calvert indicated that his petition had been unsuccessful. Further events in Greece, particularly the Dilessi murders of April, put paid to any prospect of an official permit that year, and Schliemann left Greece for Troy, where he excavated until 1873.
Throughout his time in Troy, Schliemann continued to push for permission to excavate in Greece. On , he became a member of the Archaeological Society of Athens, and in January 1873 he made another petition, to Panagiotis Efstratiadis and to , the Minister for Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Education, which was again refused. Further efforts to offer 'Treasure of Priam', excavated from Troy in May 1873, in exchange for permission, were similarly rebuffed. At first, he divided his attentions between Mycenae and Olympia, but the Greek government awarded the permit for Olympia to the German government early in 1874, to which Schliemann reacted in fury. Between and , Schliemann travelled to Mycenae, hired workers and made an illegal excavation, digging 34 test trenches around the site and only stopping when forced to do so by the police, on Kallifronas's and Efstratiadis's orders.
In 1874, Dimitrios Voulgaris became Prime Minister for the eighth and final time. The new government, through Kallifronas's successor , gave Schliemann permission to excavate, but gave ultimate responsibility for the project to the Greek Archaeological Service under Efstratiadis. Efstratiadis in turn stipulated that Stamatakis should serve as supervisor to the project, responsible for ensuring that Schliemann followed the terms of his permit and that the interests of the Greek state in preserving the antiquities were respected. The archaeological historian Dora Vasilikou has suggested that the Voulgaris government's greater receptivity to Schliemann's work was a function of the high levels of corruption prevalent within it.
Schliemann's excavations of 1876
On , Valassopoulos confirmed Stamatakis as overseer of the excavation, and made clear that it was being treated as an operation of the Archaeological Society of Athens, for whom Schliemann was in effect working. Legal troubles prevented Schliemann from beginning the excavations until .