Product Code Database
Humfry Gilbert Garth Payne (19 February 1902 – 9 May 1936) was an English archaeologist, director of the British School at Athens from 1929 to his death.
He attended Westminster School and afterwards Christ Church, Oxford where he was awarded first class honours in classical Mods (1922) and Greats (1924). In 1926, he married the journalist Dilys Powell.
Payne was the younger brother of the astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–1979).
Payne spent summer archaeological excavation seasons 1927–1929 on Crete, around Knossos where Arthur Evans was working. In 1929, his work had been recognised when he was appointed as the director of the British School of Archaeology in Athens. He then, in 1930, instigated the dig at Perachora, a settlement on the Geraneia peninsula on the Gulf of Corinth. There, the sanctuary and harbour sites were to be dug from 1930 to 1933, and later in 1939 and in the 1960s. This work was written up as Perachora: the sanctuaries of Hera Akraia and Limenia, mostly by Payne, edited by Thomas Dunbabin to be published in 1940; a second volume was to be published in 1962. He also worked on archaic sculptures which had been found at the Acropolis of Athens 50 years earlier. This work, published in 1936 as Archaic marble sculpture from the Acropolis was to confirm his reputation. It changed views on the origin of many pieces; for example it identified potential reunions of sculptured parts in French museums with other parts in the Acropolis Museum. His career came to an early end when he died from an infection of staphylococcus in the Evangelismos Hospital in Athens. He was 34 years old. Biography, aegeussociety.org. Accessed 6 September 2022.
He is buried in the cemetery of Agios Georgios (St George) at Mycenae where his tombstone bears the words Mourn not for Adonais, a quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Adonais, an elegy for John Keats.
|
|
