John Bryan Ward Perkins

Background

He was the eldest son of Bryan Ward-Perkins, a British civil servant in India, and Winifred Mary Hickman. Ward-Perkins attended the Winchester School and New College, Oxford, graduating in 1934. He was awarded the Craven traveling fellowship at Magdalen College, which he used to study archaeology in Great Britain and France. He served as assistant under Sir R. E. Mortimer Wheeler (1890-1976) from 1936-39 at the London Museum. There he wrote a catalog of the museum's collection. During these years Ward-Perkins was also involved in the excavation of a Roman villa near Welwyn Garden City. In 1939 Ward-Perkins became chair of archaeology at the Royal University of Malta.

During World War II Ward-Perkins saw military service in the British Royal Artillery in North Africa. He was assigned to protect the sites of Leptis Magna and Sabratha. There he gained an intimate knowledge of Tripolitania and its Roman ruins. After the war he was appointed as director of the Allied sub-commission for monuments and fine arts in Italy. He married Margaret Sheilah Long in 1943. She was a daughter of Henry William Long, a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Together they had three sons and a daughter.

Professional career

In 1946 Ward-Perkins accepted the position of Director of the British School at Rome. He maintained a scholarly interest in North Africa, largely because excavation work in Italy remained impossible. When peninsular excavations in Italy did resume, Ward-Perkins obtained aerial photographs from RAF reconnaissance of Italy, in order to map out excavations. He remained at the British School in Rome until his retirement in 1974. In the 1950s his interest focused on the technical aspects of Roman construction and resulted in The Shrine of St Peter and the Vatican Excavations (1956) and David Talbot Rice's The Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors (1958). In 1963 Ward-Perkins revived the stalled publication project of the Corpus signorum imperii Romani, a body of Roman sculpture held in collections throughout the world. He served as visiting professor in numerous institutions, including New York University (1957) and as Rhind Lecturer in Edinburgh in 1960. In 1970 he wrote the Roman section of the prestigious Pelican History of Art volume on Etruscan and Roman architecture, co-authored with Axel Boëthius. Among his many students: the art historian Roger Ling, archaeologist Timothy W. Potter, ancient historian Barri Jones.

Topics of interest

Ward-Perkins’ major interests were in the materials of ancient art and city topography. He wrote works on city planning in classical Greece and Rome and the historical topography of Veii. He also reinitiated the project to map the Roman Empire, Tabula imperrii romani, which had begun in 1928 but had become inactive. He was instrumental in the founding of the Association for Classical Archaeology, and the issuing of its journal, Fasti Archaeologici. Perhaps one of his most important contributions was the use of field survey to assess archaeological land patterns in Italy, forever changing archaeological inquiry. One of his major survey projects, the South Etruria Survey, produced a body of evidence that remains useful to scholars. In these techniques he was a pioneer, as well as in the field of ancient marble studies.

Descendants

One of his three sons is the historian Bryan Ward-Perkins. One other, David, is a successful consultant based between London and France, and the other, Hugh, based in Italy, is a well-noted musician, specialised in ancient music.

Publications