Biography

Awarded a First in Classics at Girton College, Cambridge, Vronwy Fisher joined the British School at Athens in 1938, excavating with V. Desborough under the directorship of R. W. Hutchinson at Knossos, Crete, returning to that dig in 1940. In between, in 1939 she assisted A. J. B. Wace at Mycenae. In 1941 she married the diplomat Henry Hankey, with whom she had three sons and a daughter. She published her Euboean survey (BSA vol. 47) and during their diplomatic posting to Beirut (1962-1966) her expertise in Mycenaean and Minoan pottery enabled her to identify Mycenaean imports in Syria and Palestine and their relationship to Cypriot wares. She undertook a re-analysis of the Mycenaean ceramics of el Amarna in Egypt, bringing together the Nile and the Aegean as interconnected culture spheres. She identified Cyprus as the crucial link between East Mediterranean shipping in the Late Bronze Age. From 1970, based in London, she excavated at Myrtos Pyrgos in Crete, studying in particular the pottery and stone vessels, and thereafter until her last study visit to Crete in 1992, she developed her thinking upon Minoan vessels and Aegean trade routes (co-author of Bronze Age Chronology, 1989). The Vronwy Hankey Memorial Fund for Aegean Studies, awarded by the British School at Athens, supports research in the prehistory of the Aegean and its connections with the East Mediterranean.

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