John Henry Haynes

John Henry Haynes (27 January 1849 – 29 June 1910) was an American traveller, archaeologist and photographer, best known for his work at the first two American archaeological excavations in the Mediterranean, and Mesopotamia at Nippur and Assos. Haynes can be regarded as the father of American archaeological photography and his corpus remains an important record of numerous archaeological sites across Ottoman Anatolia.

Family John Henry Haynes was born in 1849 in Rowe, Massachusetts. He was the eldest son of John W. Haynes and Emily Taylor. Haynes' father died when he was still young, and he put off his education to care for his younger siblings.

Education In 1870, at the age of 21, Haynes enrolled in Drury Academy in North Adams. Two years later, he began his study of classics at Williams College in Williamstown. He worked his way through college, and following his graduation briefly held a position as a high school principal. In 1880, due to a chance encounter with Charles Eliot Norton, the first president of the American Institute of Archaeology, Haynes was offered a position on an archaeological expedition to Crete.

Early career Haynes's team was not able to secure a permit for the originally planned Crete expedition, and Haynes chose instead to travel to Athens. During his time there, he met photographer William J. Stillman and began working as his assistant. Following the completion of his project in Athens, Haynes joined an American archaeological excursion to Assos, where he worked under Joseph Thatcher Clarke as an archeological photographer. Despite being hired as a photographer for the project, Hayne's lack of equipment forced him to abandon photography during the 1881 dig season, and he instead became captivated by the archeological work.

In 1887, Haynes was appointed as the business manager and photographer for the University of Pennsylvania-affiliated dig at Nippur. During the first excavation season, he was accompanied by John Punnett Peters, who led the expedition, Perez Hastings Field, an architect, Daniel Noorian, who had worked with Haynes on the Wolfe Expedition, and two Assyriologists named Frank Harper and Herman V. Hilprecht. The first campaign ended in April 1889, mere months after the group arrived in Nippur, due to conflicts with local tribesman as well as clashes between Hilprecht and Peters.

In January 1890, Haynes returned to Nippur with Peters and Noorian, this time remaining for five months. Following this campaign, he returned to the site alone, acting as the director and for three years. In early 1899, Haynes returned to Nippur for one final season accompanied by his wife, Cassandra Artella Smith, and two young architects, Clarence S. Fisher and H. Valentine Geere. During this time Haynes also served as the first American consul to Baghdad from 1889 to 1892.

While in Nippur Haynes discovered somewhere around 17,000 cuneiform tablets dating from around 1749-1712 BCE, a collection which constitutes most of what we know of Sumerian Literature.

Legacy Haynes' career was largely ignored by the academic establishment until 2011, with the publication of John Henry Haynes. A Photographer and Archaeologist in the Ottoman Empire by Robert G. Ousterhout, Professor of Architectural History at the University of Pennsylvania. The Pera Museum in Istanbul and the University of Pennsylvania have also organized exhibitions of his photographs.