How an archaeological photographer helped decipher the mysterious Linear B script of ancient Greece
In short: Alison Frantz was more than just a photographer of ruins. During the Second World War, her rapid documentation of Mycenaean tablets allowed scholars to study them from afar, ultimately enabling the decipherment of Linear B. Her work bridged the gap between classical archaeology, intelligence service, and pioneering Byzantine studies.
Born in 1903, Alison Frantz became one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century archaeology, though she was often an unpaid volunteer during her early years at the Agora excavations in Athens. Her career was defined by a rigorous commitment to documentary accuracy, a style she adopted from her teacher Clarence Kennedy. This precision proved vital in 1939, when she photographed over six hundred Linear B tablets from Pylos in just two days. These images, sent to the University of Cincinnati, became the primary resource for scholars like Emmett L. Bennett and later Michael Ventris, whose 1952 breakthrough confirmed that Linear B was an early form of ancient Greek.
Frantz’s life was deeply intertwined with the geopolitical shifts of her era. During the Second World War, she joined the Office of Strategic Services, serving as a political analyst and assistant to archaeologist Carl Blegen. Her intelligence work focused on interviewing European exiles, and she later helped establish the Fulbright Program in Greece. Her commitment to the region extended to the preservation of its history; she was instrumental in the restoration of the Church of the Holy Apostles in the Athenian Agora, a project she supervised between 1954 and 1957. This was part of her broader, pioneering effort to elevate the study of Byzantine and post-classical Greece, a field previously dismissed by many scholars as the 'grubby period'.
Beyond her technical skill, Frantz was known for her daring, once climbing the Parthenon’s colonnade to capture the perfect angle of a sculpture. Her legacy is preserved in a vast archive split between the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and Princeton University. By advocating for a diachronic approach—studying the full timeline of a site rather than just its classical peak—she fundamentally changed how archaeologists interpret the layers of Greek history. Her work remains a cornerstone of the field, cited by experts as having defined the scholarly and popular understanding of Greek antiquities for decades.
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