Alan John Bayard Wace FBA FSA (13 July 1879 – 9 November 1957) was an English archaeologist who served as director of the British School at Athens (BSA) between 1914 and 1923.

Wace excavated at Mycenae in the early 1920s, and established a chronological schema for the site's tholos tombs which largely proved the "Helladic Heresy" correct.

In 1934, he returned to Cambridge as the Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology, and resumed his covert work during the Second World War, serving as a section head for the British intelligence agency MI6 in Athens, Alexandria, and Cairo.

[2] He was the second son of Frederic Charles Wace, a justice of the peace and formerly a mathematician at St John's College;[3] his mother, Fanny (née Bayard), was descended from a family prominent in New York.

[15] Jones resigned the directorship for reasons of ill health in 1905, and intended Wace to be his successor; however, the school's committee appointed Thomas Ashby as acting director in September of that year.

[17] He excavated the Menelaion sanctuary in 1909 alongside Maurice S. Thompson and John Percival Droop;[18] his publication of the lead votive objects deposited there was described by the archaeologist Hector Catling in 1998 as "definitive and of permanent value".

[22] In April 1905, he made a survey of the Magnesian peninsula in Thessaly alongside Albert William van Buren [de] of the American School of Classical Studies in Rome.

[27] Wace organised an exhibition of Greek embroidery at Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum in 1906, almost exclusively composed of pieces he had collected with Dawkins and studied with Pesel and John Myers, another alumnus of the BSA.

[38] He accepted the offer of the directorate, which came with an annual salary of £500 (equivalent to £60,610 in 2023), at the managing committee meeting of 24 March,[39] and took up office in the autumn, after the outbreak of the First World War.

[37] Wace's students at the BSA included the classical archaeologists Frank Stubbings [de], Vincent Desborough, Vronwy Hankey and Helen Waterhouse.

[40] Stubbings later recalled a humorous "open meeting" hosted by Wace at the BSA, in which he asked visiting academics to give a lecture based on six slides they had never previously seen.

[44] He spent his free time during the war tending to the BSA's garden, organising its library and its antiquities collection, and working on Mycenaean pottery in the National Archaeological Museum.

[4] During his enforced lodging there, Wace explored the eastern side of the island of Salamis, a short distance from Piraeus, and reported to the Greek authorities on the need for conservation work on some ancient wall-paintings there.

Gill credits Wace's reputation with attracting several non-British students to the BSA, including the Swedish Etruscologist Axel Boëthius and the papyrologist Jacob Hondius.

[55] As a result of political rioting, which took place in Athens at the end of July 1920, Wace opened the hostel of the BSA to women, against the opposition of some of the school's managing committee.

[59] Evans hoped that further excavations at Mycenae would provide evidence for his theory that Knossos was the centre of the dominant power of the Bronze Age Aegean, in line with the Classical myths of a Cretan thalassocracy under King Minos.

[d][58] Evans assisted the BSA in persuading both the Greek government and the archaeologist Christos Tsountas, who held the necessary permit, to allow them to excavate with Wace as field director.

They were able to date the Tomb of Aegisthus to early LH IIA (c. 1510–1480 BCE),[69] and to show that it was earlier than the larger Treasury of Atreus, thereby providing strong evidence for Wace and Blegen's chronological model.

Waterhouse suggests that this was due to Wace's disfavour with influential members of the committee, who had disagreed with his decision to excavate at Mycenae, preferring the school to focus on sites of the classical period.

[72] Several Greek professors and archaeological ephors wrote to the BSA's London committee, expressing their regret at the decision and crediting Wace with establishing "the very high scientific reputation" of the school.

[76] While at the V&A, he published widely on embroidery from various periods, including a preface for Louisa Pesel's 1929 handbook for embroiderers based on seventeenth-century samplers and an exhibition catalogue co-written with his wife in the same year.

[78] Wace wrote about the statuette in The Times, declaring it "the earliest piece of true sculpture found on Greek soil"; in a letter to Cockerell on 12 February, he called it "ravishingly beautiful".

[79] By the end of the year, the statue was widely suspected to be a forgery: Wace published a monograph on it in May 1927, titled A Cretan Statuette in the Fitzwilliam Museum: A Study in Minoan Costume,[80] but reviews of the book in 1928 largely doubted the piece's authenticity.

[88] During the winter of 1940–1941, at which time Greece was under invasion from Italy, Wace collaborated with the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos on a study of the façade of the Treasury of Atreus.

[96] He also excavated a Hellenistic temple at Hermopolis Magna in central Egypt, dedicated to the Ptolemaic ruler Ptolemy III; the results of this project were published posthumously in 1959.

He suffered a heart attack in the spring of 1957,[4] though was able later that year to assist with the rearrangement of the Mycenaean Room of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, and to attend the resumption of the Mycenae excavations under John Papadimitriou.

[4] The writer Compton Mackenzie, who directed British intelligence in Athens during the First World War and met Wace during the latter's work with British refugees from Turkey during 1915–1916,[105] wrote of him as: A delightful combination of great scholarship and humour, a worldly humour too and not in the least pedagogic ... a tall, slim man full of nervous energy, with a fresh complexion and an extraordinarily merry pair of light blue eyes.

[108] The couple met at Mycenae in June 1922 and became engaged on a yacht cruise in May 1923, which was also attended by Blegen and his fellow American archaeologists Bert Hodge Hill and Leicester Holland, as well as all three of their future wives, Elizabeth Pierce, Ida Thallon, and Louise Adams.

[111] She also completed his monograph on the tapestries from the collection of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, at Blenheim Palace for publication in 1968: a review in History Today praised her work and called it "a fitting tribute to this notable scholar".

In 1951, he was made an honorary fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and was also the honorand of a special edition of the Annual of the British School at Athens to commemorate his fifty years in archaeology.