Elizabeth French

Elizabeth Bayard Wace was born in 1931 in London, the daughter of the archaeologists Alan Wace and Helen Wace (), 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. during the summers she joined Wace's excavations at Mycenae. 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). 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. == 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. She died in Cambridge on 10 June 2021, aged 90. == Selected publications ==

• • ''Mycenae: Agamemnon's Capital. The Site and its Setting.'' (Tempus, 2002) • Archaeological Atlas of Mycenae, with Spiros Iakovidis (Archaeological Society of Athens, 2003) == Resources ==

• Archive of Elizabeth French's professional papers (University of Cambridge Faculty of Classics Archives) • Mycenae excavation and publication archive (University of Cambridge Faculty of Classics Archives) ==References==