Elizabeth French
Elizabeth Bayard French (née Wace; 19 January 1931 – 10 June 2021), also known as Lisa French, was a British archaeologist and academic, specialising in Mycenaean Greece, especially pottery and terracotta figurines and the site of Mycenae. She was the first woman to serve as director of the British School at Athens (BSA).
Wace spent much of her early life in Greece, where her father, Alan Wace, was director of the BSA. She attended her first archaeological excavations at the age of eight, at Mycenae. During the Second World War, she was evacuated from Greece to the United States, and subsequently lived briefly in Egypt before finishing her education at Cheltenham Ladies' College and Newnham College, Cambridge. After leaving Cambridge, she studied archaeological conservation at University College London and worked as a secondary school teacher while completing a part-time doctorate at London, which she was awarded in 1961.
Wace married the archaeologist David French in 1959. She excavated over many years at Mycenae and at other sites in Greece and Turkey, where she lived with her husband at the British Institute at Ankara. After her divorce in 1975, she returned to the UK, where she worked at the University of Manchester from 1976 until 1989. As director of the BSA between 1989 and 1994, she completed further fieldwork and excavation at Mycenae and published accounts of the finds from the site. She returned to Cambridge from 1994, where she lectured on Mycenaean pottery, and died in 2021.
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