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Mycenae Archive
Mycenae Archive
The Mycenae Archive presented here draws
on the core collection in the Archives of the Faculty of
Classics at the University of Cambridge. The collection
principally consists of notebooks, drawings, plans and
photographs of the archaeological endeavours of the team of the
British School at Athens at Mycenae in 1920-1923, 1939 and
1950-1957 under the directorship of Alan John Bayard Wace
(1879-1957). Some of the documents presented here are housed in
two collections held physically in the British School at Athens
(BSA): the Mycenae Excavation Records and as part of its
BSA-Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (SPHS) Image
Collection.
To celebrate 100 years from the start of Wace’s work at
Mycenae in 1920, we have united digitally this collection to
offer the public and the scholarly community this resource for
perusal in the hope that it will inspire, spark new questions
and debates, and advance our knowledge of this key site for the
history of early Greece and of the Mediterranean as a
whole...
his digitised collection unifies online material held
in Cambridge and at the BSA in Athens amounting to almost 5150
pages of 80 excavation notebooks from the years 1920-1923,
1939, 1950-1957. It also includes more than 1700 photographs
and over 600 drawings and plans of Mycenae’s remains, within
and outside the citadel walls, and of small finds from Wace’s
excavations. Unlike edited printed publications, the
digitisation of this archival material allows the viewer to
form a sense of the nature of the physical documents and to
witness history in the making. These records are invaluable in
helping specialists do archaeology in reverse – from physical
records in digital format working their way back to the
excavation trenches and individual finds – and in allowing all
those interested in Mycenae’s past to get closer to the
day-to-day activities of pioneers in archaeological
fieldwork.
Highlights include Alan Wace’s
original notes and thoughts on the progress of the
excavation work at Mycenae, the astonishing colour
drawings of reconstructed frescoes, jewellery and other
finds from Mycenae by Piet de Jong as well as his detailed
architectural plans of tombs and architectural remains. The
notes of Winifred
Lamb and Walter Heurtley,
accompanied by numerous sketches, offer vivid accounts of an
archaeologist’s tasks at work. Lulu Eldridge made some spectacular
off-the-cuff, pen and ink pottery drawings in two tiny
notebooks, while photographs
captured candid moments in the process of excavation,
unremarked in the written record, that connect us with
immediacy to life on an active dig a century ago.
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