Elizabeth (Lisa) Bayard French (1931–2021)

Abstract

Lisa French (1931–2021) was the first woman to be appointed as Director of the British School at Athens, from 1989–1994. Most of her adult life and career were devoted to the site of Mycenae, where she excavated with her father, Professor Alan Wace, in the 1950s and after his death in 1957 with Lord William Taylour. Thereafter, she continued studying and publishing the results of the excavations and studying and publishing on Mycenae and Mycenaean material culture more generally for the rest of her life. In 2013 she donated the Mycenae archive, containing records of all the British excavations at Mycenae, to the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge. She married David French in 1959, by whom she had two daughters. Her marriage led to her combining her work at Mycenae with playing an important part in French's excavations and, after he became Director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, in effect taking responsibility for running the Institute from 1968 until 1976. The organisational experience this gave her proved invaluable when, after their divorce, she took up the wardenship of Ashburne Hall at Manchester University and later still when she became Director of the British School at Athens. Lisa was best known for her work on the Mycenaean terracotta figurines, which were originally the subject of her PhD thesis at University College London, and on the stratigraphically based chronology and typology of Mycenaean ceramic production, particularly that of Late Helladic III. Over the years, she successfully initiated successive generations of students of Mycenaean archaeology into the mysteries of its pottery.

2 The work of the British School at Athens, 2021–2022

“…The Times , The Telegraph , and The Guardian carried obituaries of her, and she was also featured in BBC Radio 4’s Last Word . The 2022 volume of the BSA carries a full account of her life by Sue Sherratt (Sherratt 2022). On 26 May 2022, the BSA staged a hybrid memorial event in Athens, comprising talks by the director, Iphiyenia Tournavitou (University of Thessaly), one of Lisa’s doctoral students, and Lisa’s daughter, Ann French.…”