Elizabeth French

This article is about the English archaeologist. For the American genealogist, see Elizabeth French Bartlett.

Elizabeth (Lisa) Bayard French (19 January 1931 - 10 June 2021) was a former warden of Ashburne Hall, Manchester, former director of the British School at Athens and an authority in Mycenaean archaeology, especially pottery and terracotta figurines.

Early life

Elizabeth B. French was born in 1931 in London, the daughter of the archaeologists Alan Wace and Helen Pence,and god-daughter of Wace's colleague Carl Blegen. She studied Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she held the Mathilde Blind Scholarship, which would later be held by Margaret Drabble.

Career

French developed a detailed classification scheme for a series of Mycenaean terra cotta figurines dating from the Late Helladic period (c.1500 - 1100 B.C.). She coined the term kourotrophos for a particular class of these artifacts depicting a woman holding a child. She has been involved in excavation and publication of archaeological excavation at Mycenae for many years and recently completed a survey of the remains around Mycenae in collaboration with the Archaeological Society of Athens. She wrote an account of the monuments and history of Mycenae itself. 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', Annual of the British School at Athens, 106 (2009) 175-232 is the first attempt to align discoveries at the two most important Mycenaean sites. French was the first woman to direct the British School at Athens (1989-1994).