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Elizabeth French

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British archaeologist (1931–2021) This article is about the English archaeologist. For the American genealogist, see Elizabeth French Bartlett.

Elizabeth FrenchFSA
A grey-haired woman, facing the camera, in a t-shirt with a cartoon of the Warrior Vase from Mycenae.
BornElizabeth Bayard Wace
(1931-01-19)19 January 1931
London, England
Died10 June 2021(2021-06-10) (aged 90)
Known forExcavations at Mycenae; study of Mycenaean terracotta figurines
Spouse David French ​ ​(m. 1959; div. 1975)​
ParentAlan Wace (father)
Academic background
Alma materNewnham College, Cambridge
University College London
ThesisThe Development of Mycenaean Terracotta Figurines (1961)
Doctoral advisorMartin Robertson
Academic work
DisciplineArchaeology
Sub-disciplineMycenaean Greek archaeology
InstitutionsRoyal Masonic School for Girls, Rickmansworth
University of Manchester
British School at Athens
University of Cambridge

Elizabeth Bayard French FSA (née Wace; 19 January 1931 – 10 June 2021), also known as Lisa French, was a British archaeologist and academic, specialising in Mycenaean Greece, especially pottery and terracotta figurines and the site of Mycenae. She was the first woman to serve as director of the British School at Athens (BSA).

Wace spent much of her early life in Greece, where her father, Alan Wace, was director of the BSA. She attended her first archaeological excavations at the age of eight, at Mycenae. During the Second World War, she was evacuated from Greece to the United States, and subsequently lived briefly in Egypt before finishing her education at Cheltenham Ladies' College and Newnham College, Cambridge. After leaving Cambridge, she studied archaeological conservation at University College London and worked as a secondary school teacher while completing a part-time doctorate at London, which she was awarded in 1961.

Wace married the archaeologist David French in 1959. She excavated over many years at Mycenae and at other sites in Greece and Turkey, where she lived with her husband at the British Institute at Ankara. After her divorce in 1975, she returned to the UK, where she worked at the University of Manchester from 1976 until 1989. As director of the BSA between 1989 and 1994, she completed further fieldwork and excavation at Mycenae and published accounts of the finds from the site. She returned to Cambridge from 1994, where she lectured on Mycenaean pottery, and died in 2021.

Early life and education

Elizabeth Bayard Wace was born in 1931 in London, the daughter of the archaeologists Alan Wace and Helen Wace (née Pence), and god-daughter of Wace's colleague Carl Blegen; the family moved to Cambridge when she was 3 years old. She first joined her father's excavations at Mycenae in 1939, aged 8. Following this excavation, the family stayed in Athens, where Wace attended a British Council school; after the outbreak of World War II, Wace and her mother left for America in June 1940, before joining her father in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1944 on his appointment as Professor of Classics and Archaeology at the Farouk I University at Alexandria. In 1946, the family returned to the UK, where Wace completed her schooling at Cheltenham Ladies' College.

Wace read Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1949 to 1952, where she held the Mathilde Blind Scholarship; during the summers she joined Wace's excavations at Mycenae. After graduating, French studied for a Diploma in Conservation at the Institute of Archaeology in London, and then taught Classics at the Royal Masonic School for Girls, Rickmansworth, joining the excavations at Mycenae during the summers as she had during her undergraduate studies; while teaching, she began working on a part-time PhD at University College London, under the supervision of the classicist and poet Martin Robertson, on The development of Mycenaean terracotta figures. During this time she also attended the British School at Athens as a student (1958–59) and, thanks to a Virginia Gildersleeve Fellowship from the International Federation of University Women, spent the next year (1959–60) in Greece studying Mycenaean material for her thesis as well as finds from Ayios Stephanos and Tiryns, and excavating at Mycenae and Knossos. Her PhD was awarded in 1961.

Career

French was a leading expert in Mycenaean pottery, especially figurines, and a long-standing excavator of the site of Mycenae. In her PhD thesis, she developed a detailed classification scheme for a series of Mycenaean terracotta figurines dating from the Late Helladic period (c. 1500–1100 BC). She coined the term kourotrophos for a particular class of these artifacts depicting a woman holding a child. She excavated at Mycenae for many years, from 1950-1957 with her father Alan Wace, and following his death with Lord William Taylour and George Mylonas until 1969, and developed a systematic classification of Mycenaean pottery, enabling its use in establishing the relative date of archaeological finds. French and Taylour were also joint editors, with Kenneth Wardle, of the series of publications arising from the Mycenae excavations, Well-Built Mycenae (1981-). In the 1960s she lived in Ankara with her husband David French, at that time Director of the British Institute at Ankara, joining excavations at Ayios Stephanos (Greece) and Can Hasan (Turkey), and working on material excavated from Greek sites such as Tiryns. French served as the Warden of Ashburne Hall, a residential hall of the University of Manchester, from 1976 to 1989, during which time she was also an honorary lecturer in the Manchester Department of Archaeology; in 1989, she succeeded Hector Catling as Director of the British School at Athens, becoming the first woman to hold the post. She served as director until 1994. After returning from Athens, she settled in Cambridge, lecturing on Mycenaean pottery for the university's Faculty of Classics.

French's key publications include an account of the monuments and history of the whole site of Mycenae, and completed and published a survey of the remains around Mycenae in collaboration with Spiros Iakovidis and the Archaeological Society of Athens, Her joint publication with P. S. Stockhammer, "Correlating recent research: the pottery of Mycenae and Tiryns in the second half of the 13th century BC", is the first attempt to align discoveries at these two important Mycenaean sites.

French was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1979, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens in 2004. In 2013, she gave the Mycenae Archive of papers from the British excavations at this site between 1920 and 1969, as well as her own archive of professional papers, to the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge.

Personal life

French was married to the archaeologist David French (1933–2017) from 1959 to 1975; the couple, who met while studying material from Mycenae in 1956, had two daughters, Ann and Catherine. She died in Cambridge on 10 June 2021, aged 90.

Selected publications

  • French, Elizabeth (1971). "The Development of Mycenaean Terracotta Figurines". The Annual of the British School at Athens. 66: 101–187. doi:10.1017/S0068245400019146. JSTOR 30103231. S2CID 194064357.
  • Mycenae: Agamemnon's Capital. The Site and its Setting. (Tempus, 2002)
  • Archaeological Atlas of Mycenae, with Spiros Iakovidis (Archaeological Society of Athens, 2003)

Resources

References

  1. Newnham College Register, vol III (2 ed.). Newnham College. 1981. p. 342.
  2. ^ "British School at Athens : Elizabeth (Lisa) Bayard French (19 January 1931 – 10 June 2021)". Retrieved 13 June 2021.
  3. ^ Obituaries, Telegraph (2 July 2021). "Elizabeth French, archaeologist driven by a lifelong love of the ancient Greek civilisation of Mycenae – obituary". The Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Retrieved 7 July 2021.
  4. ^ "It is with immense sadness that the Faculty reports that Elizabeth (Lisa) French passed away yesterday in Cambridge, 10 June 2021. She was 90". www.classics.cam.ac.uk. 11 June 2021. Retrieved 14 June 2021.
  5. ^ "Collection: The Professional Papers of Elizabeth Bayard Wace French (1931–2021), archaeologist | ArchiveSearch". arcspace-pub.lib.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 15 June 2021.
  6. Newnham College Register, vol III (2 ed.). Newnham College. 1981. p. 342.
  7. Sherratt, Susan (2022). "Elizabeth (Lisa) Bayard French (1931–2021)". The Annual of the British School at Athens. 117: 457–463. doi:10.1017/S0068245422000089. S2CID 251085986.
  8. "Lisa French obituary". the Guardian. 22 July 2021. Retrieved 22 July 2021.
  9. Trckova-Flamee, Alena (September 2005). "The Mycenaean Terracotta Figurine from the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels". ANISTORITON: ArtHistory. 9: O053. Archived from the original on 11 February 2006. Retrieved 16 April 2006.
  10. ^ "Lisa French obituary". the Guardian. 22 July 2021. Retrieved 23 July 2021.
  11. "Hector Catling". The Telegraph. 6 March 2013. Retrieved 6 March 2013.
  12. E. B. French, Mycenae, Agamemnon's Capital, 2002
  13. S. Iakovides and E. B. French, Archaeological Atlas of Mycenae, 2003
  14. Annual of the British School at Athens, 106 (2009) 175–232
  15. "Collection: The Professional Papers of Elizabeth Bayard Wace French (1931- 2021), archaeologist | ArchiveSearch". arcspace-pub.lib.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 24 June 2021.
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