Crawford Greenewalt Jr., Archaeologist Who Dug at Sardis, Dies at 74 Crawford Greenewalt Jr., an archaeologist whose work over half a century helped illuminate the lives of king and commoner in the ancient city of Sardis, died on May 4 in Hockessin, Del. He was 74. His death, of a brain tumor, was announced by the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an emeritus professor of classical archaeology. Professor Greenewalt had dug at Sardis, in what is now western Turkey, every summer from the 1950s through last year. From 1976 to 2007 he was the field director of the expedition, which began in 1958 and is a joint project of the Harvard University Art Museums and Cornell University. Familiarly known as Greenie, Professor Greenewalt was a scion of the du Pont family who by all accounts wore his wealth, lineage and erudition lightly. "He was one of the great colossi of Anatolian archaeology, and in a very modest way," Nicholas D. Cahill, the excavation's current field director, said in a telephone interview, adding, "He had a hand in really transforming our whole notion of Sardis as a city." As the expedition's field director, Professor Greenewalt (pronounced GREEN-walt) oversaw an international team - including archaeologists, anthropologists, architects, art historians, photographers, illustrators, conservators and students - in the continuing effort to excavate the city, which flourished in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. Sardis was the capital of the Lydian Empire, a powerful kingdom in Asia Minor whose last king was Croesus, famed to this day for his immense wealth. The city was renowned as the birthplace of coinage, something confirmed in the early 1970s after the excavation uncovered refining furnaces used to separate the pure gold and silver from which coins were struck. More than 14,000 objects have been unearthed at Sardis so far, from the Lydian era and from the later deposits - Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman - under which the city had long lain buried. "Sardis," Professor Greenewalt told Science News in 1990, "is an archaeologist's dream." The Lydian artifacts include coins, sculpture, painted pottery, fragments of an iron military helmet, plain and fancy dishes and cooking vessels with food - wheat, barley, chickpeas, garlic - still inside. In a significant find, Professor Greenewalt also uncovered jugs containing the skeletons of puppies, apparently prepared as ritual meals for a deity. Croesus lost Lydia to the Persians in a fierce battle in about 547 B.C. Evidence of this battle unearthed by Professor Greenewalt and his colleagues, including the remains of a soldier, has further elucidated the lives of ordinary Lydians. "When the excavation was started, we had a notion of Sardis as a city of kings and peasants," said Professor Cahill, a former graduate student of Professor Greenewalt's, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin. Greenie found and excavated our evidence for daily life of the common man, of soldiers. In 1988, digging amid the rubble of what had been a massive stone and mud-brick wall enclosing the city - the wall had stood at least 40 feet high and was more than 60 feet thick - Professor Greenewalt and his colleagues came upon the skeleton of a young man who showed signs of having died by violence. "Just before death his left forearm had been broken, probably when raised in a gesture of self-defense," he wrote in a 1992 article. That the man was a soldier was suggested by the bones of his upper body, analyzed by a physical anthropologist, Melodie Domurad. The development of his arms was consistent with that of someone who had routinely carried a shield in his left hand and wielded a sword or spear in his right. The compression of his cervical vertebrae suggested the wearing of a helmet. In its right hand the skeleton clutched a stone. "The stone might have been a standard missile, and evidence that its holder was an army slinger or stone thrower," Professor Greenewalt wrote. More probably, however, it was a weapon of chance, picked up in desperation, in a final act of defiance. Crawford Hallock Greenewalt Jr. was born in Wilmington, Del., on June 3, 1937, the son of Crawford Hallock and Margaretta du Pont Greenewalt. His father, a chemical engineer and ornithologist, was president of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, as the chemical giant is formally known, from 1948 to 1962. Mr. Greenewalt earned a bachelor's degree from Harvard in 1959, followed by a Ph.D. in 1966 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote his dissertation on Lydian pottery. He began working at the Sardis excavation when still an undergraduate, earning a reputation as an intrepid crawler through the narrow tunnels dug by would-be tomb robbers in the Roman era. He joined the expedition formally in 1959 as a staff photographer. Professor Greenewalt, who lived in Berkeley, is survived by a sister, Nancy G. Frederick, of Hockessin. His publications include a monograph, "Ritual Dinners in Early Historic Sardis" (1978). In a field in which speculation is an ever-present seduction, Professor Greenewalt was admired by colleagues for his constitutional caution. This restraint is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his discussion of the stone-wielding soldier of Sardis. "There may be a great story here," Professor Greenewalt wrote in his 1992 paper, "a "common man inspired to an uncommon level of accomplishment," "an average man inspired to above-average performance." " He added, encapsulating the haunting narrative uncertainty with which every archaeologist must live, "We shall never know."