Alan Wace

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 Wace 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 Disney 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]

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] Outside Laconia, he worked with Ernest Gardner, who organised archaeological tours of Athens, contributed to a survey of Athens's Byzantine churches, and collaborated on studies of the church of Hagia Irene and of the base of the Obelisk of Theodosius, both in Istanbul.[13]

Plan of the site of Sesklo in Thessaly, from Wace and Thompson's Prehistoric Greece

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.[14] 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.[15] 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.[16]

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,[17] 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.[18] The archaeologist Helen Waterhouse attributes Wace's later specialism in prehistory to the enthusiasm for Neolithic pottery he developed in Thessaly.[19] 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".[20] The outbreak of war halted his research, the results of which he published alongside Thompson in 1914.[21] Also 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]

Wace succeeded Dawkins as director of the BSA in 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War in August of that year.[22] His students at the BSA included the classical archaeologists Frank Stubbings, Vincent Desborough, Vronwy Hankey and Helen Waterhouse.[23]

Post-war archaeology and the "Helladic Heresy"

Figurine, known as the "Ivory Triad", found by Wace in the Treasury of Atreus in 1939, called "the most remarkable of all Mycenaean ivories" by Waterhouse in 1986.[30]

In November 1919, Wace's contract as director of the BSA was renewed for another three years, and he left the British legation. His biographer David Gill credits Wace's reputation with attracting several non-British students to the BSA, including the Swedish Etruscologist Axel Boëthius and the papyrologist Jacob Hondius. He also assisted in the foundation of the Museum of Greek Handicrafts.[2] Wace suggested expanding the BSA's archaeological remit to include the study of geology and botany, but his proposals were not enacted.[31]

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.[32] 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.[33] 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.[lower-alpha 1][32] 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.[32] He also donated £100 (equivalent to £4,273 in 2021) towards the project, to be used for the excavation of the monument known as the Tomb of Aegisthus.[32]

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.[35] This ran contrary to the view proposed by Wace and Blegen in 1918, by which the culture of mainland Greece ("Helladic" culture) had maintained fundamentally autochthonous through the Shaft Graves period until the end of the Bronze Age.[27] 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.[36] 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.[37]

Wace intended to fully excavate all seven of the thus-far unexcavated tholoi between 1920 and 1923.[37] 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.[38] 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.[39] This would be the only tomb fully excavated during the 1920–1923 campaigns, though Wace had all of the tholoi re-examined and their first architectural plans drawn up by the Anglo-Dutch draughtsman Piet de Jong.[37] 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.[40]

By May 1923, Wace and Lamb had constructed the outline of a three-phase chronological model for the tholoi at Mycenae,[39] 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),[41] and to show that it was earlier than the larger Treasury of Atreus, thereby providing strong evidence for Wace and Blegen's chronological model.[37] During this period, Wace also assisted Blegen in the ASCSA's excavations at Zygouries, a site between Mycenae and Corinth.[2]

Arthur Evans was a prominent critic of Wace's ideas about the relationship between Minoan and Mycenaean civilisation, which were dubbed the "Helladic Heresy"

Wace remained at the BSA until later in 1923, when the School's committee declined to renew his appointment. Waterhouse suggests that this was due to Wace's disagreements with influential members of the Committee, who had disagreed with his decision to excavate at Mycenae, preferring the School to focus on sites of the classical period.[42] He was succeeded by Arthur Woodward, who had been his deputy director.[2] Wace subsequently lectured at Princeton University in 1923 and at the Archaeological Institute of America in 1923–1924. He was offered a post at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in 1924, but needed to remain in Britain following the death of his brother-in-law; he also declined in 1925 an invitation to excavate at Beth She'an in Mandatory Palestine on the museum's behalf. Evans continued to write critically of Wace in the press, including in The Times in April 1924. Wace, meanwhile, was selected to write the chapters on the Aegean Bronze Age for the Cambridge Ancient History.[43]

Wace 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.[44] While at the V&A, he published widely on embroidery from various periods, including a preface for Louisa Pesel's 1929 handbook for embroiderers based on seventeenth-century samplers and an exhibition catalogue co-written with his wife in the same year.[2] In 1929, he organised the Exhibition of English Decorative Art, held at Lansdowne House, described in one of Wace's obituaries as his greatest achievement in the field of textiles.[45] Wace did not return to archaeology in Greece during this period, though he joined Blegen at the latter's excavations of Troy in 1933.[2]

In 1926, Wace was asked by Sydney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, to authenticate a marble statuette (later known as the "Fitzwilliam Goddess") being offered for sale to the museum by Charles Seltman, a lecturer in classics at Queen's College, Cambridge. The statue was claimed to be Minoan in date: Wace considered it authentic, as subsequently did Evans.[46] Wace wrote about the statuette in The Times, declaring it "the earliest piece of true sculpture found on Greek soil"; in a letter to Cockerell on 12 February, he called it "ravishingly beautiful".[47] By the end of the year, the statue was widely suspected to be a forgery: Wace published a monograph on it in May 1927, titled A Cretan Statuette in the Fitzwilliam Museum: A Study in Minoan Costume,[48] but reviews of the book in 1928 largely doubted the piece's authenticity.[49] The museum recategorised it as "of uncertain date or authenticity" in 1961 and removed it from display in 1991;[50] by this point, it was generally considered a forgery dating from the 1920s.[51]

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 Beatrice Lindell Cook, whose husband had collected them in Egypt; the book was still considered a standard work in the twenty-first century.[52]

Wace returned to Mycenae in July 1939, following a visiting appointment at the University of Toronto.[2] His excavations discovered the "Prehistoric Cemetery", predominantly consisting of chamber tombs, to the west of the citadel.[53] He also made new excavations of the Treasury of Atreus, which proved that the tomb had been constructed no later than the LH IIIA1 period (c. 1400 – c. 1300 BCE).[54] When the Second World War broke out in September, 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.[24] In March 1940, he gave a public lecture on Mycenae, which was attended by King Georgios of Greece.[55]

British soldiers in Cairo, 1943: Wace conducted intelligence work in the city after his evacuation from Greece.

In April 1941,[55] shortly before the the fall of Greece to Axis forces the following month, Wace and other British intelligence officers relocated to Alexandria in Egypt, where he debriefed British troops evacuated there from Greece.[56] He subsequently worked for MI6 in Cairo. His duties included editing and publishing intelligence reports, and he ran the department providing false passports and documentation to agents of the British Special Operations Executive operating in the Aegean.[57] He was evacuated briefly to Jerusalem in 1942, shortly before the First Battle of El Alamein.[2] He also conducted 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.[58] 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.[59]

Wace retired from his Cambridge professorship in 1944, having reached the age limit of sixty-five for normal service and realising that he would be unable to return to Cambridge during the war.[60] He was subsequently appointed, on the encouragement of the British Council,[2] as professor of classics and classical archaeology in Alexandria's Farouk I University.[lower-alpha 2][6]

Alongside the French Egyptologist Étienne Drioton, Wace organised a 1944 exhibition of Coptic art in Cairo. Shortly after the Second World War, he loaned his extensive collection of Greek embroideries to the Liverpool Museum, which later purchased them.[2] In 1947, he attempted to find the Tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria, unsuccessfully excavating at a hill known as Kom al-Dikka, then widely believed to be the tomb's location.[61] He also excavated a Hellenistic temple at Hermopolis Magna in central Egypt, dedicated to the Ptolemaic ruler Ptolemy III; the results of this project were published posthumously in 1959.[62]

He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in 1948: there, he completed his archaeological guide to Mycenae, published in 1949.[63] He made further excavations at Mycenae between 1950 and 1955,[5] following the end of the Greek Civil War in October 1949. His excavations in 1952 discovered the first Linear B tablets known from the site.[2] In 1952, violence in the British-administered Suez Canal Zone, including the killing of fifty Egyptian police officers in January, led to a military coup which overthrew King Farouk and imposed a nationalist government led by Mohamed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser.[64] The new government sacked Wace, who moved to Cyprus. During this period, he visited Princeton each year: he also undertook study seasons at Mycenae in 1956 and 1957.[2]

Wace experienced poor cardiovascular health over a period of several years. He suffered a heart attack in the spring of 1957,[2] and died of another on 9 November 1957, at his home in Athens.[65] He was buried in the Protestant section of the First Cemetery of Athens.[2]

The Scottish writer Compton Mackenzie, who met Wace during the latter's work with British refugees from Turkey during 1915–1916, wrote of him as:

A delightful combination of great scholarship and humour, a worldly humour too and not in the least pedagogic ... a tall, slim man full of nervous energy, with a fresh complexion and an extraordinarily merry pair of light blue eyes.[66]

The historian Arnold Toynbee, who visited the BSA in the 1911–1912 academic year, described Wace and Thompson thus:

They hunted together like a couple of hounds; and, like hounds on the scent, they were indifferent, while chasing their quarry, to heat, cold, hunger, or exposure to the elements. They set one an exacting standard of physical endurance.[67]

Wace was married to the American archaeologist Helen Wace (née Pence), a former student of the BSR who had worked on the Roman port of Ostia.[68] The couple met at Mycenae in June 1922 and became engaged on a yacht cruise in May 1923, which was also attended by Blegen and his fellow American archaeologists Bert Hodge Hill and Leicester Holland, as well as all three of their future wives, Elizabeth Pierce, Ida Thallon, and Louise Adams. Wace and Pence married in St Albans on 20 June 1925;[2] the archaeologist Elizabeth (Lisa) Bayard French, born in 1931, was their daughter.[69] In 1964, Helen Wace privately published a series of Alan's fictional writings as Greece Untrodden.[70]

Wace was made a doctor honoris causa of the University of Amsterdam in 1932, of the University of Liverpool in 1935, of the University of Pennsylvania in 1940, and of the University of Cambridge in 1951.[2] He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1945,[71] as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1947, and as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He was made an honorary fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1951, and was also the honorand of a special edition of the Annual of the British School at Athens to commemorate his fifty years in archaeology. In 1952, he was made an officer of the Patriarchal Order of St. Mark the Evangelist, Alexandria. He was also an honorary member of the Archaeological Society of Athens, the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, and of the Royal Society of Archaeology of Alexandria. In 1953, he received the Petrie Medal,[2] awarded by the University of London for distinguished contributions to archaeology.[72]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alan Wace.

• 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.