Virginia Randolph Grace

Virginia Randolph Grace was born in 1901 and died in 1994; she is best known for her studies of Greek amphorae, but she was active in Cyprus early in her career¹. In 1931 she was on the University Museum (Pennsylvania) team that opened 38 tombs at Vrysi tou Barba, Lapithos, under the general direction of Bert Hodge Hill, with Lucy Talcott and the architect Dorothy H. Cox². Herscher writes that her notes preserve the data of the excavation, still unpublished when he wrote¹. She published Tomb 806A, with its imported Middle Minoan jar, in the American Journal of Archaeology in 1940^2,8. In that year she also allowed Porphyrios Dikaios to cite the Lapithos gold ear-rings in his report on Vounous⁴.

At Kourion, George H. McFadden wrote that she had supervised Tombs 1 and 9 of the Ayios Ermoyenis necropolis and would publish them. She supplied his provisional catalogue of Rhodian and other large amphoras and dated a rose-stamped amphora to the first century BC or later³. She visited Jim Stewart at Karmi and wrote to him in 1937, and she wrote to Eve Stewart after his death in 1962⁶.

Karageorghis's 1968 chronicle cites her 1967 identification of the commonest amphora type from the Kyrenia shipwreck as Rhodian, of the last third of the fourth century BC⁵. She died in Athens⁷.