Bulletin

Issue: April 2004

News

More recognition for La Trobe's Greek Pottery expert

Dr Ian McPhee, senior lecturer in Art History at La Trobe University, has received further recognition for his expertise on Greek pottery from the Classical Age.

He is an acknowledged world expert on two types of Greek pottery - fifth and fourth century BC red-figured vases from Greece and the Greek colonies in southern Italy, and pottery from the city of Corinth of the same period.

A classical archaeologist as well as an art historian, Dr McPhee has won a Margo Tytus Visiting Fellowship to the University of Cincinnati.

The scholarship is prestigious in the field of classics and classical archaeology. Competition from scholars is fierce, as the University of Cincinnati is regarded as one of the foremost in the world in these fields.

In Cincinnati, Dr McPhee will continue his research from March to June, 2005, on a large project that has already taken a decade - and is still about five years from publication.

This project is being undertaken jointly with his wife, Dr Elizabeth Pemberton, until her recent retirement a reader at The University of Melbourne, and also a classical archaeologist. Together they are classifying a deposit discovered at Corinth in 1971 of more than 500 kilograms of pottery unearthed from an ancient drain filled in towards the end of the fourth century BC.

Dr McPhee is well known to Cincinnati University. It was there he won his PhD back in 1968 with a thesis on Classical Greek pottery. The excavations at Corinth, which Dr McPhee and Dr Pemberton have visited many times over the past decade, are under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

Over the years, Dr McPhee has been closely associated with this School and recently also with the smaller Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens. In June-July last year, for example, he spent two weeks studying red-figure pottery from the Australian excavations at Torone in northern Greece, and two weeks in Corinth.

?Most of the pottery unearthed in this deposit at Corinth is broken but many pots were thrown whole into the drain and broke on the spot so we have been able to join fragments together to make complete or near complete vases,? Dr McPhee said.

Working in his two fields of classical archaeology has been made easier by the presence at La Trobe University of the A. D. Trendall Research Centre for Ancient Mediterranean Studies which houses a large library and a collection of 40,000 photographs of decorated pottery from southern Italy of the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

The photographs illustrate scenes of daily life, theatre, warfare and myths. The Trendall Archive is the largest of its kind in the world and is of major interest to scholars in this field from many countries.

Its founder, Professor Dale Trendall, who died in 1995, was regarded as one of the greatest historians of the 20th century of Greek art of the and the world authority on Greek and southern Italian red-figured vases.

He joined La Trobe University as Resident Fellow in 1969 and was responsible not only for the collection of photographs and books in the Centre but was also instrumental in the acquisition of a distinguished representative collection of Greek vases at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Dr McPhee was originally attracted to La Trobe by the presence of Professor Trendall and became director of the Centre after Professor Trendall bequeathed the bulk of his estate, including his photograph collection and library, to the University.

At Cincinnati Dr McPhee will be working to revise the first draft of the study of the pottery from the Corinthian drain. The draft manuscript, which is nearly complete, must be examined by the past and current directors of the excavations at Corinth and sent to other scholars to be refereed before it is accepted for publication. The work will eventually appear in the important Corinth series, but the long process will take another four or five years.

Dr McPhee will also be starting another project based upon his recent research. This will be a more extensive archae-ological study of the archaeology of Corinth during the 4th century, when the city was going through major social and economic change.

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