Alan Wace
Alan John Bayard Wace was an English archaeologist who served as director of the British School at Athens between 1914 and 1923. 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. 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 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.
Early life and education
Alan John Bayard Wace was born on 13 July 1879, at 4 Camden Place in Cambridge. He was the second son of Frederic Charles Wace, a justice of the peace and a mathematician at St John's College; his mother, Fanny, was descended from a family prominent in New York. Frederic Wace served as mayor of Cambridge in 1889–1891, the first university academic to hold the post. He died in 1893, whereupon the family moved to Shrewsbury, and Wace attended Shrewsbury School, a public school in the town, where he was head boy in 1898. He entered the University of 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 Wace obtained a First, the highest possible grade, in Part I of the tripos examinations. Wace's tutor, the classicist R. A. Neil, suggested that he study classical archaeology for Part II, his final year: Wace subsequently achieved a First with distinction in the examinations of 1901.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 Disney Professor of Archaeology. Among his Cambridge contemporaries was the future folklorist and archaeologist R. M. Dawkins. In 1902, he attended the British School at Athens, one of Greece's foreign archaeological institutes, as a student, having won the Prendergast Scholarship to do so. While there, he completed a research project on reliefs and royal portraits in Hellenistic sculpture, part of which he published in the school's journal, Annual of the British School at Athens, in 1902. The project became the nucleus of his 1935 monograph, An Approach to Greek Sculpture. His biographer David Gill describes Wace as "perhaps one of the strongest students of Hellenistic sculpture to emerge from Cambridge". Wace 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.
Early academic career
Wace moved to the British School at Rome in 1903 on a Craven studentship. He supplemented his income by working as a secretary to Ernest Gardner, a professor of classical art and archaeology at University College London and former director of the BSA, on Gardner's educational cruises for his students of the Aegean: these took place on SS Pelops during Easter 1903 and on SS Peneios during Easter 1904. Wace was elected as a fellow of Pembroke College in 1904. He worked briefly as a librarian at the BSR between 1905 and 1906, supported by a grant from the British government to allow the BSR to catalogue the sculptures in the Capitoline Museum, the Palazzo dei Conservatori and the. In the 19041905 season, he catalogued the Roman portrait sculptures of the Capitoline Museum, while the school's director, Henry Stuart Jones, catalogued its Greek ones. Jones resigned the directorship for reasons of ill health in 1905, and intended Wace to be his successor; however, the school's committee appointed Thomas Ashby as acting director in September of that year. Wace remained as librarian and acted as Ashby's assistant. 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 not appointed.From 1904 onwards, the BSA was engaged in an extended campaign in the Laconia region of southern Greece. 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. Alongside the archaeologist Marcus Tod, he reviewed the artefacts stored in the Archaeological Museum of Sparta; Tod specialised in the inscriptions while Wace catalogued the sculptures and other finds. He excavated the Menelaion sanctuary in 1909 alongside Maurice S. Thompson and John Percival Droop; his publication of the lead votive objects deposited there was described by the archaeologist Hector Catling in 1998 as "definitive and of permanent value". He also excavated with the BSA at Sparta, and was given charge of the work on a Roman bathhouse known as the "Arapissa", as well as that on the city's circuit wall. His other work in Laconia included the excavation of a number of tombs, a survey of the eastern coast of the Laconian Gulf, and a small-scale excavation of a shrine at Epidauros Limera. Outside Laconia, he worked with Gardner, who organised archaeological tours of Athens. Wace also contributed to a survey of Athens's Byzantine churches, collaborated on studies of the statue base of the charioteer Porphyrius and of the base of the Obelisk of Theodosius, both in Istanbul. In April 1905, he made a survey of the Magnesian peninsula in Thessaly alongside Albert William Van Buren of the American School of Classical Studies in Rome.
Bosanquet left the BSA in 1906; Wace was one of three candidates, alongside Dawkins and Duncan Mackenzie, shortlisted for the directorship. Wace was noted in a meeting of the school's managing committee as "a competent and keen worker and capable of extracting work from others", but was also considered inexperienced, and the committee criticised his "slovenly" writing style. Wace was ultimately rejected in favour of Dawkins. Following Dawkins's appointment, he and Wace toured through the Dodecanese in the summer of 1906 and in 1907. The pair recorded inscriptions, collected embroidered artwork and pursued Dawkins's interest in modern Greek dialects. 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. Wace wrote articles for The Burlington Magazine, an academic journal covering fine art, throughout the first decade of the 1900s, and continued to exhibit his collection along with Dawkins, including at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1914.
In June 1907, Wace and Droop travelled to Thessaly in northern Greece. Wace believed that the prehistoric sites of the region would provide evidence for the civilisation of Greece before the Bronze Age, in which it was then generally believed that Greece had come under the domination of Minoan Crete. Wace and Droop excavated Bronze Age tombs at Theotokou, where Wace had previously visited in 1905, and then proceeded to conduct field surveys in search of prehistoric mounds, known as. 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. The archaeologist Helen Waterhouse attributes Wace's later specialism in prehistory to the enthusiasm for Neolithic pottery he developed in Thessaly. During their Thessalian travels, Wace, Thompson and Arthur Woodward, with whom Wace made some of his visits, also noted several ancient inscriptions, some of which they published themselves; Woodward also published other texts collected by Wace and Thompson.
Between 1910 and 1912, Wace conducted, alongside Thompson, anthropological research among the nomadic Vlach people of Epirus. The two accompanied the Vlachs on their annual summer migration, which lasted eight days, from the lowland site of Tyrnavos to 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". The hostilities halted his research, the results of which he published in a book co-authored with Thompson in 1914. By 1912, Wace was considered an expert on both Aegean prehistory and classical sculpture. That year, he took a post at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, as a lecturer in ancient history and archaeology. He left his fellowship at Pembroke in 1913.