Lucy Shoe Meritt

Lucy Taxis Shoe Meritt (born August 7, 1906 in Camden, New Jersey ; died April 13, 2003 in Austin, Texas ) was an American classical archaeologist and architectural historian .

Shoe Meritt studied archeology from 1923 under Rhys Carpenter at Bryn Mawr College , where she received an AB in 1927 and an MA in 1928 . In 1929 she became a Fellow of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and came into contact with Greek architecture for the first time . Contrary to what she learned in textbooks, she found that the profiles used on ancient buildings differ greatly from one another. From 1930 to 1934 she studied the profiles of Greek architecture on site and presented the result in a work published in 1936 "Profiles of Greek Moldings" , with which she had received her doctorate in 1935 in Bryn Mawr .

A scholarship from the American Academy in Rome took her to Italy as a fellow in 1936/37 . There she continued her profile studies on the buildings of Greater Greece and Sicily . She presented the result in 1952 in the “Profiles of Western Greek Moldings” . From 1937 to 1950 she taught at Mount Holyoke College , a women-only college for the liberal arts . In 1949/50 she was again a Research Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and now extended her research to the Italian profiles. In the "Etruscan and Roman Republican Moldings" published in 1965 , she was able to point out fundamental differences in the design principles of the various architectural landscapes. Their investigations clearly showed the independence of Etruscan architecture from Greek on the one hand, and the dependence of Roman architecture on Etruscan on the other. Overall, her research made it clear for the first time that the various shapes of profile and decorative strips in ancient architecture are time-dependent and represent an important historical dating criterion.

From 1950 Shoe Meritt was editor-in-chief for the publications of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, a position she held until 1972. Married to the classical philologist and epigraphist Benjamin Dean Meritt since 1964 , she left Greece in 1972 and followed her husband, who retired in 1969 and who took up a visiting professorship at the University of Texas at Austin . She herself worked at the same university from 1973 until her death as a professor and visiting scholar in the Department of Classical Archeology.

Lucy Shoe Meritt received the Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement from the Archaeological Institute of America in 1977 for her achievements . She received honorary doctorates from Brown University in 1974 and from Hamilton College, New York in 1979 . She was a member of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Historical Society of Princeton .

Publications (selection)

• Profiles of Greek Moldings. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1936.
• Profiles of Western Greek Moldings. 1952.
• Etruscan and Roman Republican Moldings. American Academy in Rome, Rome 1965.
• A History of the American School of Classical Studies, 1939-1980. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Princeton, NJ 1984 ( online ).
• With Ingrid Edlund-Berry: Etruscan and Republican Roman Moldings. Extended Edition. American Academy in Rome, Rome 2000.

literature

• Meritt, Lucy Taxis (Shoe) (1906-). In: Marilyn Ogilvie (Ed.): The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: L – Z. Routledge, New York 2000, p. 885.

Web links

• Biography with Bryn Mawr