A leading figure in Greek field survey throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Hope Simpson played a major role in the University of Minnesota Messenia Expedition and in the production of several of the key gazetteers of Mycenaean civilisation in Greece.

His work was significant in allowing an understanding of Mycenaean states, particularly in Messenia, beyond the relatively small number of large, well-known and excavated sites.

Hope Simpson believed in the essential historicity of the Homeric epics and produced several works, including his doctoral thesis, attempting to locate the toponyms of the Iliad with the archaeological sites known from Mycenaean Greece.

In the spring of 1957, while still a doctoral student, he had completed a survey of the Spercheios Valley in Phthiotis in central Greece, alongside his frequent collaborator John Lazenby.

[11] Like most of his future survey work, the expedition consisted largely of the collection and cataloguing of surface finds, with the view to identifying and mapping sites of Mycenaean habitation.

[12] In the spring of 1956–7, he spent seven weeks surveying in south-eastern Messenia, with the assistance of David French, and later published his work as 'Identifying a Mycenaean State', in which he linked his discoveries with the 'Seven Cities' promised to Achilles by Agamemnon in the Iliad.

Firstly, they made extensive use of aerial photography, provided by the Hellenic Air Force during the summers, to identify promising sites for investigation, enabling them to cover far more ground than previous surveys.

[24] During the UMME season of August 1966, Hope Simpson travelled to the marble quarries at Kypranion in Laconia, recovering samples which he used in collaboration with Reynold Higgins and S.E.

This publication was praised for its thorough coverage and inclusion of maps and plans, including an early effort to address the question of roads and routeways in Mycenaean Greece, which later formed the basis of his 2006 book (with D.K.

[30] By 1983, such large-scale gazetteers, making use of extensive survey to catalogue sites in a diachronic manner, could be described as "the familiar Hope Simpson format".

[29] From 1985 to 1991,[33] he directed the intensive survey of the island of Pseira, near Crete, uncovering 315 prehistoric sites ranging chronologically from the Neolithic to the Byzantine period.

[35] From 1990 to 1995, he served on the advisory board of the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project, led by Jack Davis,[36] which aimed to supplement the work done by Hope Simpson and McDonald through the UMME survey with detailed, small-scale intensive study of Messenian sites and landscapes.