Winifred Lamb

Winifred Lamb (born November 2, 1894 in London , † September 16, 1963 in Borden Wood ) was a British archaeologist . She undertook extensive research in Greece and Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s and is known for her studies of ancient bronze sculptures .

Life

childhood and education

Winifred Lamb was the daughter of Edmund George and Mabel Lamb. Her father was a Liberal MP for North Hertfordshire in the House of Commons from 1906 to 1910 .

Winifred Lamb was homeschooled by her parents and prepared for the University of Cambridge entrance exams. From 1913 she attended courses in classical antiquity at Newnham College . At the time, women were not yet allowed to become officially members of the university. She developed a special interest in the archeology of Greece and began collecting Greek ceramics .

Lamb finished her studies in 1917. In the same year she became a member of the British Naval Intelligence Department , for which the archaeologist John Beazley worked at the time, who influenced her further archaeological work.

In 1940 she received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge with Gordon Childe .

Field work

In 1920 Lamb traveled to Athens for the first time , where she made contacts with the British School at Athens . Among other things, she got to know Carl Blegen , who was the deputy head of the excavations in Mycenae . In 1931 she became a permanent member of the British School and was a long member of its board. Since she spoke fluent German, she also had good connections to the German Archaeological Institute , including Wilhelm Dörpfeld .

In the 1920s and 1930s Lamb participated in several excavations at the British School at Athens. From 1922 she worked in Mycenae, where she examined the Mycenaean frescoes . In 1924 she began exploring the Macedonian Vardaroftsa with WA Heurtley . From 1923 to 1924 and from 1927 to 1934 she worked on the excavations in Sparta .

In 1928 she undertook a survey on the island of Lesbos in search of her own excavation project . After a brief excavation in the ancient city of Methymna , she conducted research in Thermi from 1929 to 1933 , and additionally in Antissa from 1931 to 1933 . In 1934 she was also commissioned by the British School at Athens with new excavations in the Kato Phana site on Chios , which Konstantinos Kourouniotis had previously investigated . There she began to study Eastern Greek vase painting and sculpture.

This work sparked her interest in Anatolia and its relations with Greece since prehistoric times. After completing the work in Thermi, Lamb began an excavation project in Kusura , about 55 km from Afyonkarahisar . So she gained a reputation as an expert on the prehistory of Anatolia.

Museum work

In 1919 Sydney Carlyle Cockerell , the then director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University, Winifred Lamb offered a post as "Honorary Keeper of Greek Antiquities" . She held this position until 1958. She expanded the collection to include finds from Anatolia, rearranged the collection of prehistoric and archaic art and studied the Greek and Roman bronzes. She also put together two volumes of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum for the museum , working closely with John Beazley.

World War II and post-war period

During the Second World War , Winifred Lamb returned to England also to look after her mother, who died in 1941. In the same year, Lamb, who was fluent in Greek and Turkish, began working as a consultant for the BBC . First she was brought in for questions about Greece, from 1942 to 1946 she worked for the Turkish department of the Near East Department of the BBC.

Towards the end of the war, her home in north London was hit by a German missile. Lamb barely survived but was seriously injured.

After the war she continued her work at the Fitzwilliam Museum. She also founded the British Institute of Archeology in Ankara with John Garstang , of which she became Vice President in 1957.

Her health deteriorated drastically from 1958, presumably as a long-term consequence of her war injuries. Winifred Lamb spent the last years of her life at her family home in Borden Wood, where she died in 1963 at the age of 68. Her scientific estate - her records as well as her private collection - have been split between the Fitzwilliam Museum and the British School at Athens.

Fonts (selection)

• Greek and Roman Bronzes. Methuen 1929.
• Excavations at Thermi in Lesbos. University Press, Cambridge 1936.

literature

• David WJ Gill: Winifred Lamb: Aegean Prehistorian and Museum Curator. Archaeopress, Oxford 2018.
• David WJ Gill: Winifred Lamb, 1894-1963. In: Getzel M. Cohen, Martha Sharp Joukowsky (Eds.): Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists. University of Michigan Press, Michigan 2004, ISBN 0-472-11372-0 , pp. 425-481.