Winifred Lamb, archaeologist and museum curator, was born on 3 November 1894 in Camden Hill London, the only child of Edmund George Lamb, landowner and Liberal MP, and Mabel Winkworth, who was also educated at Newnham College Cambridge. Lamb was admitted to Newnham in 1913, gaining a first in parts I and II of the classical tripos, where she became interested in classical archaeology. She became an associate of Newnham College in 1926. After the First World War she was invited to become Honarary Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the Fitzwilliam Museum, a position she held until 1958.

In 1920 she became a student at the British School in Athens and joined the British excavations at Mycenae under A.J.B. Wace, followed in 1924 by excavations in Macedonia with W.A. Heurtley, and then Sparta under A.M. Woodward. Lamb was keen to explore the link between the southern Balkans, the northern Aegean and northwest Anatolia; to this end she explored the island of Lesbos, and at Thermi identified a prehistoric site that she excavated from 1929 to 1933 (published in the monograph Excavations at Thermi in Lesbos, 1936). After finishing her work on Lesbos, she turned her attention to Anatolia, electing Kusura as a possible site for excavation. Her three seasons of work here were published in Archaeologica in 1936 and 1937.

In addition to her fieldwork, Lamb continued to expand the Greek collections at the Fitzwilliam. She published Greek and Roman Bronzes in 1929 and the two Cambridge fascicles of Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, 1930 and 1936.

When the Second World War began, Lamb returned to her family home in Borden Wood to take care of her ailing mother. Her death in August 1941 freed Lamb to accept the post of Greek language supervisor at the BBC, transferring to the Turkish section of the Near East department the next year until 1946. Towards the end of the war a V2 rocket destroyed her lodgings in London, injuring her but killing her housemates. After the war she focussed her attention on the newly founded British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, of which she was Hon. Secretary from 1948 to 1957, then a Vice-President. She subsequently made several trips to Anatolia and published articles in Anatolian Studies in 1954, 1956.

In 1958, ill health caused her to resign from the Fitzwilliam Museum and retire to her beloved home in Borden Wood. She died of a stroke on 16 September 1963.