holding a child. She excavated at Mycenae for many years, from 1950-1957 with her father Alan Wace, and following his death with Lord William Taylour and George Mylonas until 1969, and developed a systematic classification of Mycenaean pottery, enabling its use in establishing the relative date of archaeological finds. French and Taylour were also joint editors, with Kenneth Wardle, of the series of publications arising from the Mycenae excavations, Well-Built Mycenae (1981-). In the 1960s she lived in Ankara with her husband David French, at that time Director of the British Institute at Ankara, joining excavations at Ayios Stephanos (Greece) and Can Hasan (Turkey), and working on material excavated from Greek sites such as Tiryns. French served as the Warden of Ashburne Hall, a residential hall of the University of Manchester, from 1976-1989, during which time she was also an honorary lecturer in the Manchester Department of Archaeology; in 1989, she succeeded Hector Catling as Director of the British School at Athens, becoming the first woman to hold the post. She served as director until 1994. French's key publications include an account of the monuments and history of the whole site of Mycenae, and completed and published a survey of the remains around Mycenae in collaboration with Spiros Iakovidis and the Archaeological Society of Athens, Her joint publication with P. S. Stockhammer, "Correlating recent research: the pottery of Mycenae and Tiryns in the second half of the 13th century BC", is the first attempt to align discoveries at these two important Mycenaean sites. French was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1979, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens in 2004. In 2013, she gave the Mycenae Archive of papers from the British excavations at this site between 1920 and 1969, as well as her own archive of professional papers, to the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge. Personal life French was married to the archaeologist David French (1933–2017) from 1959 to 1975; the couple, who met while studying material from Mycenae in 1956, had two daughters, Ann and Catherine. She died in Cambridge on 10 June 2021, aged 90. Selected publications “The Development of Mycenaean Terracotta Figurines.” The Annual of the British School at Athens, vol. 66, 1971, pp. 101–187. Mycenae: Agamemnon's Capital. The Site and its Setting. (Tempus, 2002) Archaeological Atlas of Mycenae, with Spiros Iakovidis (Archaeological Society of Athens, 2003) Resources