LILIAN HAMILTON JEFFERY

1915-1986

3. Pre-war Studies in Greece & Work with Antony Raubitschek

With this in mind, she went out to the British School at Athens in November 1937, with its Walston Studentship and a Mary Ewart Travelling Scholarship. She remained devoted to the School throughout her life. It had given her, as to many others, not only opportunities for hard work and travel (also then hard work), but warm companionships. The circle of her friendships with foreign and Greek archaeologists was ultimately enormous. Her first year took her round a wide variety of sites and gave her her first taste of excavation under Edith Eccles on Chios. She won golden opinions, and was elected to a Jenner Research Fellowship at Newnham and the School's own School Studentship.

In January 1939 she went back to Athens with a more specific task. In her first year, she had already developed an interest in a topic off her main beat: the work of the Athenian sculptors Kritios and Nesiotes, which presented linked problems of sculp-tural and epigraphic scholarship in the transitional period from Archaic to Classical styles. Problems of that kind were peculiarly the province of Antony E. Raubitschek of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, who had already made a series of major discoveries by bringing together inscribed and sculptural fragments from the Athenian Acropolis. He was now planning a collection of the archaic dedications from the Acropolis, but political developments were intervening. Although he had been offered a research base at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, there were still substantial gaps in the museum work needed for a full publication. On his way to America, he discussed the matter with Anne. In her stay at Athens in 1939, while continuing her more general work on archaic inscriptions, she filled the gaps in his photographs and measurements, providing in particular all the material on the marble basins, which he had not previously worked on. In her version of events, she was a minor collaborator to the expert, but Raubitschek's preface to the completed Dedications from the Athenian Akropolis (1949) makes it clear that her suggestions had gone well beyond the factual material, and he firmly put her name on the title-page. As far as the long term was concerned, participation in such a coherent project developed her ability to fit minute detail into an overall feel for a society, in a way in which the investigation of scattered archaic inscriptions could not yet do.