Homer Thompson; Expert on Agora in Athens

Homer Thompson, 93, an archeologist who was a leading expert on Agora, the civic center of ancient Athens. A Canadian born in Devlin, Ontario, Thompson majored in the classics and received undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of British Columbia. While he was earning his doctorate at the University of Michigan, a faculty member helped him win assignment to a project that was just getting underway in Athens, the search for the Agora. Thompson was one of the first two fellows selected to participate. For nearly 40 years, he would be associated with the Agora, either as acting deputy or field director of the excavations. In an interview with Smithsonian magazine some years ago, Thompson recalled that the search for the Agora was not easy. He recalled that it took seven years to find the first boundary marker that identified the city center. “It wasn’t a thrill so much as a relief,” Thompson said. “We believed we were working in the Agora, but some of our colleagues would come by and ask ‘How do you know that you’re in the Agora?’ Well, this settled it.” When not occupied with digs in Greece, Thompson taught archeology, first at the University of Toronto and after World War II at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. During World War II, Thompson served as an intelligence officer in the Canadian navy. The author of several books, Thompson wrote what many consider the definitive study of Greek pottery of the red figure style from the end of the 4th century BC to the end of the 2nd century BC. In an obituary in the New York Times on Saturday, Richard H. Howland, a retired archeologist at the Smithsonian Institution, called Thompson “the outstanding classical archeologist of his generation, perhaps of two generations.” On May 7 at his home in Hightstown, N.J.