“French, the son of a Yorkshire policeman, graduated with a BA in Classics from Cambridge University, but found his vocation as an archaeologist in Greece through encounters at the British School at Athens…”

The latest digital publication of the British Institute at Ankara is a collection of papers that commemorate and appraise the work of David French, director of the BIAA from 1968 to 1994. His career as a field archaeologist in Greece, Turkey and the Near East spanned nearly 60 years from the mid 1950s until his death in 2017. The present volume provides a fascinating insight into the life of a field archaeologist in this region during the second half of the twentieth century.

French, the son of a Yorkshire policeman, graduated with a BA in Classics from the University of Cambridge, but found his vocation as an archaeologist in Greece through encounters at the British School at Athens.  There he met A.J. B. Wace, formerly Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge, and Wace’s daughter Elisabeth (Lisa), whom he married in 1959. French travelled in Greece with the Mycenaean archaeologist Dick Hope-Simpson, worked on the pottery from Mycenae and conducted important surveys in Thessaly, continuing research begun by Wace before the First World War. In 1957, he joined Professor Rodney Young’s excavation at Gordion after which Turkey became the main focus for the rest of his life’s work.

His Cambridge PhD thesis investigated the links between the Aegean and western Anatolia in the Bronze Age.  He directed excavations in the south Konya plain at the Chalcolithic and Neolithic site of Can Hasan, a complement to the work of his elder contemporary James Mellaart at Çatal Höyük, and in the Upper and Middle Euphrates at Aşvan and Tille Höyük as part of rescue projects.

In the second half of his career he drew on his Classics training to carry out a comprehensive survey of the Roman roads and milestones of Asia Minor.  At the same time, under his directorship, the British Institute at Ankara evolved to become one of the largest and best-equipped research centres for the archaeology and history of the Mediterranean and Near East.

The papers have been written by those who knew him best personally and professionally, and provide insights and evaluations of French’s work as a prehistorian and an excavating archaeologist. They discuss French’s early years in Greece, his research undertakings on the Bronze Age in the Aegean and west Anatolia, the excavation at Can Hasan, and his engagement with the Euphrates rescue projects, notable for their ground-breaking emphasis on environmental archaeology, as well as his role as the longest-serving director of the BIAA.  The volume also contains a full bibliography of French’s publications.  Collectively, these contributions are a valuable documentation of a formative period in Anatolian archaeology and the development of archaeology as a discipline in the second half of the twentieth century.

Table of contents

Obituary of David French. Reprinted from Anatolian Studies 67 (2017).

Bibliography of David French’s publications.

Elizabeth French, David French at Mycenae and Can Hasan.

Harald Hauptmann, With David French from the Peneios to the Euphrates and beyond.

Stephen Mitchell, David French, Cambridge and the ‘New Archaeology’: breaking new ground at Aşvan.

Stuart Blaylock, Reminiscences of David French at Tille Höyük, 1980-1990.

Altan Çilingiroğlu, My first excavation teacher: David French.

Lutgarde Vandeput, David French, founder of the BIAA Research Centre.

İlhan Temizsoy, My friend David French.

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This open access volume is available here.

A specially curated collection of research papers celebrating David French’s work can be accessed on Cambridge Core.