A.J.B. Wace Papers: Cambridge Classics Archive

The Alan John Bayard Wace Papers, held in the archives of the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, contains a number of field notebooks which are the perfect size for an Edwardian man’s capacious jacket pocket. They accompanied Wace during the Spring seasons of 1908 to 1910, on his excavations in Thessaly. Appropriate for working field-notebooks, observations were dashed off rapidly in pencil as Wace stood by the trench. They reveal his meticulous eye for detail in their recording of levels and associated finds, plotting the stratigraphy for posterity. He also recorded the local excavators’ names and wages at the back.

The title and sub-title of one of these notebooks, ‘The Romance of Excavation: detailing some futile endeavours to make great discoveries in Thessaly’, was a private joke for Wace alone, never to be formally published in any academic text. It suggests Wace’s exuberant delight and enthusiasm for exploring both the ancient and the contemporary landscapes of Greece. The notebooks also detail inscriptions he encountered by chance on his travels and jottings on modern Greek dialect. Wace is perhaps best known as the British excavator of Bronze Age Mycenae. However, his early field notebooks are testament to his deep interest in earlier Greek prehistory, which abided with him for a lifetime. In 1956, the year before his death, Wace visited Volos Museum, and corresponded on Neolithic finds with the archaeologist Dimitiris Theocharis, still energetically engaged with the subject of ‘great discoveries in Thessaly’.