Search Results - Wace, Alan John Bayard 1879-1957

Alan Wace

Alan John Bayard Wace (13 July 1879 – 9 November 1957) was an English archaeologist who served as director of the British School at Athens (BSA) between 1914 and 1923.|name=BSAExplain}} He excavated widely in Thessaly, Laconia, and Egypt and at the Bronze Age site of Mycenae in Greece. He was also an authority on Greek textiles and a prolific collector of Greek embroidery.

Educated at Shrewsbury School and Pembroke College, Cambridge, Wace initially focused his scholarly interests on Ancient Greek sculpture and modern Greek anthropology. He first attended the BSA in 1902, before moving to the British School at Rome (BSR). While a member of the BSR, he participated in the BSA's excavations at Sparta and in the region of Laconia in southern Greece. Between 1907 and 1912, he surveyed widely in the northern Greek region of Thessaly, before taking a post at the Scottish University of St Andrews in 1912.

In 1914, Wace returned to the BSA as its director, though his archaeological work was soon interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. During the war, he worked for the British intelligence services and excavated with his long-term collaborator Carl Blegen at the prehistoric site of Korakou. This project generated Wace and Blegen's theory of the long-term continuity of mainland Greek ("Helladic") culture, which contradicted the established scholarly view that Minoan Crete had been the dominant culture of the Aegean Bronze Age, and became known as the "Helladic Heresy". Wace excavated at Mycenae in the early 1920s, and established a chronological schema for the site's tombs which largely proved the "Helladic Heresy" correct.

Wace lost his position at the BSA in 1923, and spent ten years as a curator of textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 1934, he returned to Cambridge as the Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology, and resumed his covert work during the Second World War, serving as a section head for the British intelligence agency MI6 in Athens, Alexandria, and Cairo. He retired from Cambridge in 1944 and was appointed to a post at Alexandria's Farouk I University. During his tenure there, he continued to excavate at Mycenae and unsuccessfully attempted to locate the tomb of Alexander the Great. He was sacked after the 1952 Egyptian revolution, but continued to excavate, publish and study until his death in 1957. His daughter, Lisa French, accompanied him on several campaigns at Mycenae and later directed excavations there. Provided by Wikipedia