Elizabeth Bayard French, FSA ( Wace; 19 January 1931 – 10 June 2021), also known as Lisa French, was a British archaeologist and academic, specialising in Mycenaean Greece, especially pottery and terracotta figurines and the site of Mycenae. During her career, she served as warden of Ashburne Hall, Manchester, and director of the British School at Athens. Early life and education Elizabeth French was born in 1931 in London, the daughter of the archaeologists Alan Wace and Helen Wace (née Pence), and god-daughter of Wace's colleague Carl Blegen; the family moved to Cambridge when she was 3 years old. She first joined Wace's excavations at Mycenae in 1939, aged 8. Following this excavation, the Wace family stayed in Athens, where French attended a British Council school; after the outbreak of World War II, French and her mother left for America in June 1940, before joining her father in Alexandria, Egypt, four years later on his appointment as Professor of Classics and Archaeology at the Farouk I University at Alexandria. In 1946, the family returned to the UK, where French completed her schooling at Cheltenham Ladies' College. French read Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1949 to 1952, where she held the Mathilde Blind Scholarship; during the summers she joined Wace's excavations at Mycenae. After graduating, French studied for a Diploma in Conservation at the Institute of Archaeology in London, and then taught Classics at the Royal Masonic School for Girls, Rickmansworth, joining the excavations at Mycenae during the summers as she had during her undergraduate studies; while teaching, she began working on a part-time PhD at University College London on The development of Mycenaean terracotta figures. During this time she also attended the British School at Athens as a student (1958-9) and, thanks to a Virginia Gildersleeve Fellowship from the International Federation of University Women, spent the next year (1959-60) in Greece studying Mycenaean material for her thesis as well as finds from Ayios Stephanos and Tiryns, and excavating at Mycenae and Knossos. Her PhD was awarded in 1961. Career French was a leading expert in Mycenaean pottery, especially figurines, and a long-standing excavator of the site of Mycenae. In her PhD thesis, she developed a detailed classification scheme for a series of Mycenaean terracotta figurines dating from the Late Helladic period (c. 1500–1100 BC). She coined the term kourotrophos for a particular class of these artifacts depicting a woman