Ida Hill

Ida Carleton Thallon was born on August 11, 1875 to John and Grace Green Thallon. She attended Packer Collegiate Institute for Girls in Brooklyn, New York. She obtained a Bachelor of Art Degree (AB) from Vassar College in 1897.

Hill attended the American School of Classical Studies in Athens from 1899 to 1901. Joining her at the school was fellow Vassar alumni Lida Shaw King. King and Hill were friends who travelled together for three months in Europe before starting classes. They would later collaborate on archaeological publications.

While at school, archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld's lectures on the topography of Athens had a strong influence on Hill. She was also inspired by friend and fellow student Harriet Boyd. Boyd was a strong advocate for allowing women students to participate in excavations and was successful in gaining permission from the school director to excavate a site of her choosing.

In 1900 when Hill returned for her second year, school director Rufus Richardson offered King and Hill the publication of the terracottas from Corinth. They began this project together, but Hill completed the project twenty four years later. During this time in Athens, Hill also studied geometric vases for her Master’s thesis at Vassar.

Hill's first experience of fieldwork was in February 1901, when she participated in the excavation at Varie Cave under the direction of Charles Weller. Hill and King worked again together as part of his team. Hill kept a journal during her time in the field and in the journal she describes the “day by day progress which yielded several inscriptions, hundreds of lamps and coins, and several reliefs of Pan, Hermes and the Nymphs". Hill was assigned the study of the marble reliefs, which she published in 1903.

In 1901 Hill finished her master's degree (AM) at Vassar. She then accepted a position from her alma mater as an instructor in the Greek and Roman Studies Department. She spent two years teaching Greek, from 1901 to 1903. In 1903 she enrolled at Columbia University for graduate work and completed her PhD in 1905. Her dissertation was Lycosura and the Date of Damophon, which was published in the American Journal of Archaeology. From 1906–1907 she returned to Vassar and taught Latin classes. In the next year Hill moved to the history department where she was promoted to associate professor of ancient history. She taught history classes from 1907 to 1924.

While at Vassar, Hill published her first book, Readings in Greek History, From Homer to the Battle of Cheronea; a Collection of Extractions from the Sources (1914). The book was very well received. Hill had a strong interest in the study of history, with an emphasis on the relationship between history and geography and also between history and archaeology and during these years started to research and publish her findings.

In 1916, Hill published an article discussing the connections between archaeology and history and the mutual dependence of the two sciences. In 1919 and 1921 she published two articles focusing on the connection between history and geography. Her 1919 publication compared the city of Troy's historical and physical connection with the Balkans and the Danube. In 1921, she wrote about the connection of history and geography in an article on prehistoric and classical Greece and Italy, where she said “we are learning also that despite man’s ingenuity certain fixed conditions in the physical characteristics of an area have made him follow the same routes from time immemorial either by land or by sea and have determined his economic, if not always his political, fate."

In 1923, Hill travelled to Italy and Greece to work on a publication on pre-Roman Italy with the focus being the relationship between archaeology and history. In 1924, while in Greece, Thallon married Bert Hodge Hill, then Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. After her marriage, she resigned from Vassar and moved to Greece and made Athens her permanent home.

In 1924, Hill began working on a writing project for Harold N. Fowler, the editor-in-chief of the Corinth publications. She was enlisted in publishing volumes that would cover all the excavation finds and buildings. Hill committed to publishing the terracotta's of Corinth, the project she and Lida Shaw King had initiated and not completed in 1900. With the assistance of Elizabeth Van Buren, a specialist in terracottas, Hill and Elizabeth Pierce Blegen catalogued the new finds from the excavation.

In 1925. Hill participated in an excavation directed by Carl Blegen at Heraeum in Argos. Blegen had discovered Prosymna, an important Bronze Age settlement. In 1927-1928 she participated in excavations at Prosymna and in 1932—1938 the excavation at Troy and then Pylos. At Pylos, Hill supervised the excavation of a pillaged Tholos tomb. Hill and Elizabeth Blegen were given the task of inventorying the excavation materials for Troy and Prosymna along with B. Hill’s excavation finds at Lapithos on Cyprus.

During this time, Hill began work on a textbook on Greek archeology, which was a summary of archeological findings in Greece for the prior fifty years. The outbreak of World War I interrupted archeological work being done in Greece and both the Blegens and Thallon Hill moved back to the United States. During the War, Hill worked on the college textbook.

In the 1940s, excavations of the Athenian Agora, the North Slope of the Acropolis, and the Karameikos provided Hill with the opportunity to start work on a new book on Athenian topography. This work was a guidebook as well as scholarly textbook and was published in 1953, the title was Ancient City of Athens.

Hill died in 1954 at the age of seventy nine. In June of that year, she was participating in an excavation with Carl Blegen at Pylos.

Also at the time of her death, she was working on her unpublished manuscript, 50 years of Excavations.

Hill met Elizabeth Pierce when she was Pierce's professor at Vassar in 1906. The two women formed an intimate student/mentor relationship that developed into an intimate personal relationship which continued after Pierce left for graduate work at Columbia University. When Pierce returned to Vassar to teach art history in 1915, the two friends started living in adjacent rooms in Davidson house on campus.

In 1921, Pierce travelled to Greece to attend the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. While in Athens, her budding relationship with archaeologist Carl Blegen led to a marriage proposal from Blegen. Conflicted over ending her relationship with Hill, Blegen and Pierce formed a plan in collaboration with Blegen’s friend and fellow archaeologist, Bert Hodges Hill that would allow the four friends to live together. The idea was for Pierce and Blegen to marry and Hill to propose to Thallon Hill. The two couples married in 1924, Thallon and Hill marrying on August 15 at Weston-super-Mare in England.

The two couples had a strong and intertwined relationship both professionally and personally. Thallon Hill and Pierce Blegen often worked together on excavations, cataloguing materials and publishing findings for both their husbands. In 1929 the Blegens and the Hills moved to 9 Ploutarchou Street, which became the permanent family home for the four friends. They called themselves "The Quartet" and the house became a popular meeting place for archaeologists, students of all foreign schools, diplomats, Vassar alumnae, Greek scholars, Fulbright scholars, and the staff of the American embassy.

During World War II, Bert Hill remained in Athens to look after the home on Ploutarchou Street while Thallon Hill moved to the United States with the Blegens for the duration of the war. The three friends lived in Cincinnati where Carl Blegen was a professor of classical archeology.

Hill died at sea on December 14, 1954, while traveling home to Athens. Her husband, Bert Hill, died in 1958, her dear friend Elizabeth Pierce Blegen died in 1966, three years after Pierce Blegen deeded the house on Ploutarchou Street to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. Carl Blegen died in 1971. All four archaeologists and friends are buried in the Protestant section of the First Cemetery of Athens.

• The Cave at Vari. III. Marble Reliefs, Journal of Archeology, Vol. 7, No. 3, (1903), p 301-319
• Readings in Greek History, From Homer to the Battle of Cheronea; a Collection of Extractions from the Sources. Boston: University of California Libraries, 1914
• Some Balkan and Danubian Connexions of Troy, Journal of Historical Studies 39 (1919), 185-201
• New Light on Some Problems of Ancient History Classical World 15 (1921), 10-15.
• A mediaeval humanist: Michael Akominatos, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923
• Rome of the kings an archæological setting for Livy and Virgil, New York: E.P Dutton & Co., 1925
• Corinth Series : results of excavations conducted by the American school of classical studies at Athens. Vol. 4., Decorated architectural terracottas, Cambridge: Pub. for the American School of Classical Studies at Athens Harvard University Press, 1929, (with Lida Shaw King)
• The Ancient City of Athens: Its Topography and Monuments, Chicago: Argonaut, 1953