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Alan Wace

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Alan Wace
FBA FSA
Wace at Asine in 1922
Born13 July 1879
Cambridge, England
Died9 November 1957(1957-11-09) (aged 78)
Athens, Greece
ChildrenElizabeth French
Academic background
Alma materPembroke College, Cambridge
Academic work
DisciplineArchaeologist
Sub-disciplineMycenaean civilisation
Institutions

Alan John Bayard Wace FBA FSA (13 July 1879 – 9 November 1957) was an English archaeologist. He is most known for his excavations at the Bronze Age site of Mycenae in Greece.

Early life and education

Alan John Bayard Wace was born on 13 July 1879, at 4 Camden Place in Cambridge.[1] He was the second son of Frederic Charles Wace, a mathematician at St John's College; his mother, Fanny (née Bayard), was descended from a family prominent in New York.[2] Frederic Wace served as mayor of Cambridge in 1889–1891,[3] the first university academic to hold the post. He died in 1893, whereupon the family moved to Shrewsbury, and Wace (along with his elder brother Emeric) attended Shrewsbury School, a public school in the town, where he was head boy in 1898. He went up to Cambridge on a scholarship in the same year, matriculating in classics at Pembroke College. Emeric died shortly before the end of Wace's second year, in which he obtained a First in part one of tripos. Wace's tutor, R. A. Neil, suggested that he study classical archaeology for part two, his final year:[2] Wace subsequently achieved a First with distinction in the examinations of 1901.[4]

Wace acquired a particular interest in ancient Greek sculpture from his teacher Charles Waldstein; he also gained an interest in the Aegean Bronze Age from William Ridgeway, the university's professor of archaeology. Among his Cambridge contemporaries was the future folklorist and archaeologist R. M. Dawkins.[5] In 1902, he attended the British School at Athens (BSA), one of Greece's foreign archaeological institutes, as a student.[6] While there, he completed a research project on Hellenistic sculpture, part of which he published in the school's journal, Annual of the British School at Athens, in 1902.[7] He also developed an interest in Greek textiles, perhaps from the embroiderer Louisa Pesel, who became an associate of the BSA in the same year as Wace joined, or perhaps from the school's director, Robert Carr Bosanquet, who collected them.[5]

Early academic career

Wace moved to the British School at Rome (BSR) in 1903 on a Craven studentship. He was elected as a fellow of Pembroke College in 1904.[2] Wace worked briefly as a librarian at the BSR between 1905 and 1906,[6] following a government grant to allow the BSR to catalogue its sculpture collections. During this period, Wace acted as assistant to Thomas Ashby, who was himself acting as director in the place of Henry Stuart Jones, who had been incapacitated by malaria-related ill health.[8] In the spring of 1906, the directorship was formally declared vacant; both Wace and Ashby applied, Ashby was appointed, and Wace was offered the assistant directorship, which he refused. He remained at the BSR; in 1909, he was considered as a possible successor to Ashby, though was not appointed.[2]

From 1904 onwards, the BSA was engaged in an extended campaign in the Laconia region of southern Greece.[9] Wace took part in his first excavation in 1905, under the leadership of the BSA's Frederick William Hasluck at Geraki in Laconia. Over the following years, he generally spent autumns in Rome and summers on archaeological fieldwork in Greece.[2] Alongside the archaeologist Marcus Tod, he reviewed the artefacts stored in the Sparta museum; Tod specialised in the inscriptions while Wace catalogued the sculptures and other finds.[9] He excavated the Menelaion sanctuary in 1909 alongside Maurice S. Thompson and John Percival Droop;[10] his publication of the lead votive objects deposited there was described by the archaeologist Hector Catling in 1998 as "definitive and of permanent value".[11] He also excavated with the BSA at Sparta, and was given charge of the work on a Roman bathhouse known as the "Arapissa",[12] as well as for that on the city's circuit wall.[2] His other work in Laconia included the excavation of a number of tombs and a small-scale excavation of a shrine at Epidauros Limera.[11]

Bosanquet left the BSA in 1906; Wace was one of three candidates shortlisted for the position, and noted in a meeting of the school's Council as "a competent and keen worker and capable of extracting work from others", but was ultimately rejected in favour of Dawkins.[2] After his appointment, Dawkins toured with Wace through the Dodecanese in the summer of 1906 and in 1907, collecting embroidered artwork and pursuing Dawkins's interest in modern Greek dialects.[13] Wace organised an exhibition of Greek embroidery at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum in 1906, almost exclusively composed of pieces he had collected with Dawkins and studied with Pesel and John Myers, another alumnus of the BSA.[14] Wace wrote articles for The Burlington Magazine, an academic journal covering fine art, throughout the early 1900s, and continued to exhibit his collection along with Dawkins, including at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1914.[15]

In June 1907, Wace and Droop travelled to Thessaly in northern Greece. They excavated Bronze Age tombs at Theotokou,[2] where Wace had previously visited in 1905,[16] and then proceeded to conduct field survey in search of prehistoric mounds, known as magoulas. They discovered the mound of Zerelia in 1907, then returned with Thompson and funding from Cambridge University in June 1908. Wace and Thompson continued to visit Thessaly until 1912, recovering numerous artefacts which they donated to the Fitzwilliam Museum; the results of the work were published as Prehistoric Thessaly.[17] Between 1911 and 1912, Wace conducted research at Samarina in the Pindus mountains: on the outbreak of the First Balkan War in October 1912, he wrote that "the annual disturbance" in the region had begun "earlier than usual".[18] In 1912, he took a post at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, as a lecturer in ancient history and archaeology.[6] He left his fellowship at Pembroke in 1913.[2]

Director of the British School at Athens

Wace became director of the BSA in 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War in August of that year,[6] succeeding Dawkins.[5] His students at the BSA included the classical archaeologists Frank Stubbings [de], Vincent Desborough, Vronwy Hankey and Helen Waterhouse.[19]

Wartime intelligence service

During the First World War, Wace was posted to the chancery of the British legation to Greece, where he worked in cryptography and cryptanalysis. His work including organising support for British subjects fleeing the Ottoman Empire, as well as gathering military intelligence from them. After the Gallipoli landings of 1915, Wace established the British "passport control office" in Athens, in truth a front for British intelligence, in which he identified people suspected of attempting to travel to British-controlled Egypt as spies.[20]

Post-war archaeology and the "Helladic Heresy"

In the early 1920s, Wace led the excavations of the BSA at the site of Mycenae in southern Greece. The project was encouraged by Arthur Evans, who had excavated at Knossos on Crete from 1900 and introduced the concept of "Minoan Civilisation" to scholarship.[21] Mycenae had previously been established, after the 1876–1877 excavations at Grave Circle A there, as the type site for the "Mycenaean" civilisation of the mainland.[22] Evans hoped that further excavations at Mycenae would provide evidence for his theory that Knossos was the centre of the dominant power of the Bronze Age Aegean, in line with the Classical myths of a Cretan thalassocracy under King Minos.[a][21] Evans assisted the BSA in persuading both the Greek government and the archaeologist Christos Tsountas, who held the necessary permit, to permit them to excavate with Wace as field director.[21] He also donated £100 (equivalent to £5,074 in 2023) towards the project, to be used for the excavation of the monument known as the Tomb of Aegisthus.[21]

The main priority of the excavations was to establish the chronological relationship between the shaft graves of Grave Circle A and the much larger tholos tombs at the site. Evans believed that the two sets of tombs were broadly contemporary, and that both represented the burials of Cretan-based rulers of Mycenae.[24] Wace, meanwhile, had previously co-authored a 1918 article with Carl Blegen, arguing that the culture of mainland Greece ("Helladic" culture) had maintained an essential continuity between through the Shaft Graves period until the end of the Bronze Age, and that its character was "Mycenaean as opposed to Cretan".[25] Under Wace and Blegen's model, the tholoi were correctly dated considerably later than both Grave Circle A (c. 1600–1450 BCE) and the the apogee of Neopalatial Minoan civilisation on Crete, which ended around 1500 BCE.[26] This would represent a "crescendo" of monumentality and elaboration in Mycenae's tombs, whereas Evans had argued that Mycenae had become subjected and subordinated to Crete, and that this produced a "diminuendo" in the site's wealth and ostentation.[27] John Percival Droop later called Wace and Blegen's ideas the "Helladic Heresy".[28]

Wace intended to fully excavate all seven of the thus-far unexcavated tholoi between 1920 and 1923.[27] In 1920 and 1921, he made small-scale excavations in the tomb known as the Treasury of Atreus, which failed to find conclusive evidence for its date.[29] Between 15 June and 8 July 1922, the Tomb of Aegisthus was excavated under Winifred Lamb, who was serving as Wace's second-in-charge.[30] This would be the only tomb fully excavated during the 1920–1923 campaigns, though Wace did have all of the tholoi re-examined and their first architectural plans drawn up by the Anglo-Dutch draughtsman Piet de Jong.[27] Planned excavations of the Treasury of Atreus in 1923 had to be abandoned due to safety concerns about the tomb's roof, which had partially collapsed.[31]

By May 1923, Wace and Lamb had constructed the outline of a three-phase chronological model for the tholoi at Mycenae,[30] in which they argued for a progressive increase in the scale and monumentality of the tombs. They were able to date the Tomb of Aegisthus to early LH IIA (c. 1510–1480 BCE),[32] and to show that it was earlier than the larger Treasury of Atreus, thereby providing strong evidence for Wace and Blegen's chronological model.[27]

Wace remained at the BSA until 1923, when the School's committee declined to renew his appointment. He was succeeded by Arthur Woodward, who had been his deputy director.[2] Following his dismissal, he spent ten years between 1924 and 1934 as deputy keeper of textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.[5] The Greek embroideries he collected with Dawkins formed the basis of the V&A's collection of these objects.[33]

Laurence Professorship at Cambridge

Wace became the second holder of the Laurence Professorship of Classical Archaeology, succeeding Arthur Bernard Cook on the latter's retirement in 1934.[5] He maintained his interest in Greek textiles, writing a 1935 catalogue for an exhibition entitled Mediterranean and Near Eastern Embroideries, based on the collection of a Mrs F. H. Cook, which was still considered a standard work in the twenty-first century.[15]

He returned to Mycenae in 1939, where he made additional excavations of the Treasury of Atreus, which proved that the tomb had been constructed no later than the LH IIIA1 period.[34] When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Wace moved back into the BSA with his family. He worked as a section head for the British military intelligence agency MI6, resuming his previous cover as a passport control officer, monitoring international communications and the activities of Axis intelligence agencies.[20]

Following the fall of Greece to Axis forces in May 1941, Wace and other British intelligence officers relocated to Alexandria in Egypt, where he debriefed British troops evacuated there from Greece.[35] He subsequently worked for MI6 in Cairo. His duties included editing and publishing intelligence reports, providing false passports and documentation to British agents operating in the Aegean,[36] as well as undercover work based at the British Embassy. To assist with the latter, he called on the archaeologist and BSA alumnus Martin Robertson, who joined him in Cairo in late 1942.[37] Wace developed a cooperative relationship with Rodney Young, an American archaeologist turned intelligence officer, who established the "Greek Desk" of the Office of Strategic Services in the city from 1943: their acquaintance allowed British and American intelligence to cooperate more effectively in Cairo than had been the case elsewhere, particularly in İzmir.[36]

During most of his time in Greece, Wace retained his professorship at Cambridge, but he retired from it in 1944. He was subsequently appointed as professor of classics and classical archaeology in Alexandria's Farouk I University.[b][6]

Later career

Wace made further excavations at Mycenae between 1950 and 1955.[5] In 1947, he attempted to find the Tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria, unsuccessfully excavating at a hill known as Kom ed Dik, then widely believed to be the tomb's location.[38] He retired in from his university post in 1952.[6]

Personal life and honours

Among Wace's field projects were those at Sparta, Mycenae, Troy, Thessaly, Corinth, and Alexandria. Along with Carl Blegen, Wace carried out important work on the decipherment of Linear B tablets. He was married to the American archaeologist Helen Wace (née Pence), who had worked on the Roman port of Ostia.[39] The archaeologist Elizabeth (Lisa) Bayard French was their daughter.[40]

Wace was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1945.[41] He was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1947, and as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.[2] He died on 9 November 1957, at his home in Athens, of a heart attack.[42]

Selected works

As sole author

  • Wace, Alan (1902). "Apollo Seated on the Omphalos: A Statue at Alexandria". The Annual of the British School at Athens. 9: 211–242. JSTOR 30096271.
  • — (1906). "II—Excavations at Sparta, 1906: § 11.—The Roman Baths. (Arapissa)". The Annual of the British School at Athens. 12: 407–414. doi:10.1017/S0068245400008212. JSTOR 30096368.
  • — (1909). "The Menelaion: The Lead Figurines". The Annual of the British School at Athens. 15: 127–134. JSTOR 30096408.
  • — (1923). "Excavations at Mycenae § VI — The Campaign of 1923". The Annual of the British School at Athens. 25: 5–8. doi:10.1017/S0068245400010352. S2CID 183795426.
  • — (1932). Chamber Tombs at Mycenae. Oxford: J. Johnson. OCLC 2989197.
  • — (1948). "The Sarcophagus of Alexander the Great". Farouk University Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts. 4: 1–11.
  • — (1949). Mycenae: An Archaeological History and Guide. Princeton: Princeton University Press. OCLC 1879252.
  • — (1962). Stubbings, Frank H. (ed.). A Companion to Homer. London and New York: Macmillan. OCLC 260023.
  • — (1968). The Marlborough Tapestries at Blenheim Palace and their Relation to Other Military Tapestries of the War of the Spanish Succession. London: Phaidon. ISBN 978-0-7148-1322-6.

As co-author

Footnotes

Explanatory notes

  1. ^ See e.g. Thucydides 1.4: John Pendlebury would later explicitly connect the myth of Minos with Knossos under the label of 'the Minoan thalassocracy'.[23]
  2. ^ Known since 1952 as the University of Alexandria.

References

  1. ^ Hood 1958, p. 158; Wills 2015, p. 148 (for Cambridge); Gill 2004 (for date and address).
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Gill 2004.
  3. ^ The Eagle 1893, p. 545. Gill gives only his second term, from 1890 to 1891.[2]
  4. ^ Gill 2004; Wills 2015, p. 148 (for the date).
  5. ^ a b c d e f Wills 2015, p. 148.
  6. ^ a b c d e f Hood 1958, p. 158.
  7. ^ Gill 2004. Part of the project was published as Wace 1902.[2]
  8. ^ Gill 2004; Freeman 2007, pp. 313–314 (for Jones's ill health).
  9. ^ a b Catling 1998, p. 20.
  10. ^ Catling 1998, p. 26.
  11. ^ a b Catling 1998, p. 21.
  12. ^ Gill 2004; Wace 1906, p. 407
  13. ^ Mackridge 2009, pp. 49–50.
  14. ^ Simpson 2015, pp. 187–188; Dunbabin 1954, pp. 311–312 (for Myers's BSA connection).
  15. ^ a b Simpson 2015, p. 190.
  16. ^ Wace & Droop 1907, p. 310.
  17. ^ Gill 2004; Wace & Thompson 1912.
  18. ^ Allen 2011, pp. 325–326.
  19. ^ "Frank Stubbings". The Telegraph. 10 December 2005. Retrieved 23 October 2023.
  20. ^ a b Allen 2011, p. 20.
  21. ^ a b c d Galanakis 2007, p. 240.
  22. ^ Wace & Lamb 1922, p. 185.
  23. ^ Pendlebury 1939, p. 287.
  24. ^ Evans 1929, pp. 48–49; Galanakis 2007, p. 242.
  25. ^ Blegen & Wace 1918, pp. 118–119; Galanakis 2007, p. 241.
  26. ^ Shelmerdine 2008, p. 4; Galanakis 2007, p. 242.
  27. ^ a b c d Galanakis 2007, p. 255.
  28. ^ Droop 1926.
  29. ^ Wace 1923, p. 338.
  30. ^ a b Galanakis 2007, p. 245.
  31. ^ Wace & Holland 1923, p. 296.
  32. ^ Shelmerdine 2008, p. 4; Wace & Holland 1923, pp. 306–313.
  33. ^ Simpson 2015, p. 196.
  34. ^ Hope Simpson & Dickinson 1979, p. 34.
  35. ^ Allen 2011, p. 62.
  36. ^ a b Allen 2011, pp. 120–121.
  37. ^ Sparkes 2006, p. 324.
  38. ^ Papadopoulos 1993, p. 338.
  39. ^ "Elizabeth French, Archaeologist Driven by a Lifelong Love of the Ancient Greek Civilisation of Mycenae – Obituary". The Telegraph. 2 July 2021. Retrieved 23 October 2023.
  40. ^ Newnham College Register, vol III (2 ed.). Newnham College. 1981. p. 342.
  41. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 28 March 2023.
  42. ^ Hood 1958, p. 158; The New York Times, 11 November 1957.

Bibliography

Further reading

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alan Wace.
  • "Alan John Bayard Wace". The Times. 11 November 1957. Archived from the original on 16 January 2011. Retrieved 23 October 2023 – via V&A Museum.
  • Blegen, Carl (1958). "Alan John Bayard Wace (1879–1957)". American Philosophical Society Yearbook: 162–171.
  • Stubbings, Frank H. (1958). "Alan John Bayard Wace, 1879–1957". Proceedings of the British Academy. 44: 263–280.
Academic offices
Preceded by Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University
1934 - 1944 		Succeeded by


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