Short answers, pulled from the story.
Arthur Evans (the 8th of July 1851 - the 11th of July 1941) was a British archaeologist who excavated the site of Knossos on Crete beginning in 1900 and named the Minoan civilisation. He also identified and named the ancient Cretan writing systems Linear A and Linear B, and served as Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from 1884 to 1908.
Evans began his excavations at Knossos in March 1900, hiring two foremen and thirty-two diggers to start the work. By 1903 most of the palace had been excavated, and Evans finished digging in 1905.
Linear A and Linear B are two distinct ancient Cretan writing systems identified by Arthur Evans based on clay tablets and other artefacts found at Knossos and across the eastern Mediterranean. Evans transcribed and published three thousand clay tablets in a work called Scripta Minoa, beginning in 1901. Linear B was later shown to be an early form of Greek; Linear A remains undeciphered.
Evans was appointed Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 1884 at the age of 34 and held the position until 1908. He transformed the institution from a chaotic mixed-use space into a dedicated archaeology museum, acquiring the Fortnum collection, securing the return of transferred artefacts, and eventually bequeathing his own Minoan assemblages to it.
Writing for The Manchester Guardian in 1898, Evans reported on the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority after the withdrawal of Ottoman troops from Crete. He described a massacre at the village of Eteà, where Muslim civilians who surrendered their weapons under a promise of clemency were instead shot, with the only survivor being a small girl concealed under a cape.
Evans was arrested in 1882 by Austro-Hungarian authorities in Bosnia on suspicion of acting as a British agent provocateur inciting insurrection. He had published journalism critical of Austro-Hungarian rule and written public letters supporting a rebellion. He spent six weeks in prison awaiting trial; nothing definitive could be proved and he was expelled from the country.