Dorothy Lamb

Dorothy Lamb , MBE , also Dorothy Brooke , Dorothy Nicholson and Lady Dorothy Brooke Nicholson (born October 4, 1887 in Manchester , † September 19, 1967 in Ewhurst , Surrey ) was a British classical archaeologist and one of the pioneers in her field in the United Kingdom .

Dorothy Lamb was the daughter of the mathematician and physicist Horace Lamb and his wife Elizabeth. She was one of seven siblings, one of her brothers was the painter Henry Lamb . Siblings Helen and Walter were also interested in history and archeology and studied these subjects at the University of Cambridge . She received her education first at Manchester High School and then for a year at the newly created Wycombe Abbey School in 1896 . From 1905 to 1910 she studied at Newham College, University of Cambridge. During this time she belonged to a group of friends that also included Dillwyn Knox . The first part of the Classical Tripos closed it with a third-rate note ( third class ) from the second part with the top mark ( first class ).

Together with Lilian E. Tennant , who was introduced to her by the secretary of the British School at Athens , John ff. Baker-Penoyre , she went to the British School at Athens as a student in 1910/11. Through the agency of Jane Ellen Harrison , she had received a special grant for the stay. There they could not live in the facility like the male students, but had to take up quarters in the city as women. In Athens she learned from the director of the school, Richard MacGillivray Dawkins , his deputy Arthur Maurice Woodward and the assistant to the director, Frederick William Hasluck . She was entrusted with working on the terracottas of the Acropolis Museum. Editing of the holdings of the Acropolis Museum was entrusted to the British School after the good work on the catalog of the Museum of Sparta. From April to May 1911 she took part in excavations in Phylakopi on Melos . Together with Lillian Tennant and Hilda Lorimer , she was the first woman to be involved in an excavation conducted by the British School at Athens. She stayed at the British School after her fellowship until the First Balkan War brought excavations to a standstill in Greece. On her return trip to England, she visited Paris and worked in the Louvre to identify comparative pieces for the Acropolis catalog. The first volume of the catalog was published by Guy Dickins in 1912 with Lambs . In the same year Lamb went to the United States for one year until 1913, where she taught at Bryn Mawr College . At that time, her interests shifted from Greco-Roman antiquity to Christian and Islamic archeology.

With the help of a Mary Ewart Traveling Scholarship from Newham College, she was able to return to Greece in 1913, where she took part in the excavation campaigns of the American Archaeological Expedition in Melas in 1913 and 1914 , and in the spring of 1914 in Nafplio, material from the excavations in Tiryns for Dickins' second volume on the terracottas in the Acropolis Museum. The work came to a standstill with the outbreak of World War I and was delayed even longer by Dickins' death in 1916. It was not until 1921 that the second volume, again with contributions from Lamb, could be published. In the winter of 1914 she stayed in Rome to examine Christian mosaics and visited Paris again. After another stay in Greece, she traveled on to Istanbul , where she studied Byzantine and Ottoman architecture. On two trips through Anatolia , she examined in particular the architecture of the Seljuks in Konya .

Lamb returned to England in 1916, where she initially worked from 1916 to 1918 as an assistant in the Ministry of Labor ( Ministry of National Service ), then from 1918 to 1920 in the Ministry of Food . Lamb became secretary of the London Committee Supreme Economic Council . In 1919 she was accepted as a member of the Order of the British Empire for her services . In 1920 she married the civil servant Sir John Reeve Brooke , after whose death in 1937 in 1939 Sir Walter Frederick Nicholson was again a high-ranking British civil servant. In 1946 she was widowed for the second time. After the First World War, Lamb did not return to field archeology, but continued to work as a private scholar.

Fonts

• with Guy Dickens and Stanley Casson: Catalog of the Acropolis Museum. Volume 1: Archaic Sculpture. Cambridge University Press, London 1912.
• Stanley Casson (Editor): Catalog of the Acropolis Museum. Volume 2. Cambridge University Press, London 1912. [Lamb edited the terracottas section]
• Private Letters, Pagan and Christian. An Anthology of Greek and Roman Private Letters from the Fifth Century Before Christ to the Fifth Century of Our Era. WP Dutton, New York 1930.
• Pilgrims Were They All. Studies Of Religious Adventure In The Fourth Century Of Our Era. Faber and Faber, London 1937.

literature

• David Gill: Dorothy Lamb. In: Robert B. Todd (Editor): Dictionary of British Classicists . Bristol 2004, pp. 555-556.

Web links

• Lamb at Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists