Ann Wheeler Harnwell Ashmead


Ann Wheeler Harnwell Ashmead is an American archaeologist who has co-authored comprehensive catalogues with the archaeologist Etruscologist Kyle Meredith Phillips, Jr. about the Greek Vase Painting collections of Bryn Mawr College and the Rhode Island School of Design. She has also written the main published catalogue for the Antiquities Collection of Haverford College. and many articles on Greek Vases.

Education and early career

During World War II Ashmead moved with her family from the East Coast to the West to La Jolla, California, while her father Gaylord P. Harnwell, a Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, was directing the U. S. Navy Radio and Sound Laboratory at the Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego and developing FM Sonar for submarines. During the war, she attended The Bishop's School and afterwards, upon returning East, she graduated from Lower Merion High School. She received her archaeology education at Bryn Mawr College, BA MA ; PhD in Classical Archaeology with Rhys Carpenter. Her thesis was on the Onesimos. At Bryn Mawr College professional colleagues included Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, Machteld Mellink and Kyle Phillips. Awarded an Ella Riegel Fellowship, Ashmead worked with Lucy Talcott in 1956-1957 at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens on the excavations at the Ancient Agora of Athens publishing on fragments by the Kleophrades Painter under the Directorship of Homer Thompson with his wife also an archaeologist Dorothy Burr Thompson. Ashmead then taught at Bryn Mawr College and was the Curator for Ella Riegel Museum. She became a Research Associate with the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology having written and compiled its Corpus vasorum antiquorum with the late Kyle Phillips.

Circle of archaeologists and classicists

Other colleagues and circle of archaeologists and classicists include Richmond Lattimore, Richard Green, Phyllis Pray Bober, Ingrid Edlund Berry, Theresa Howard Carter, Jess Jeanny Canby, Crawford Hallock Greenewalt, Jr., Adrienne Mayor, Jocelyn Penny Small and Dyfri Williams.

Expertise

Ann Ashmead is a classical Greek vase painting expert, the leading authority on depictions of cats, particularly the Cheetah, on 5th Century Red-Figured Greek Vases. Ashmead has also introduced technical sections in her catalogues, through the use of x-rays, including references to kiln stacking marks, under-painting and preliminary sketches, fingerprints, and fuller inscriptions, and details garnered through technological examination, before it became a more commonly accepted practice in writing about Greek Vases.

Selected works: books and articles

She is the great-great-granddaughter of Nathaniel Wheeler one of the American inventors of the sewing machine and a descendant of Jonathan Edwards President of Princeton and cousin to Marion Edwards Park President of Bryn Mawr College who also received all three degrees at the College and worked in the Agora. Ashmead was the first woman in her immediate family of notable American educators including college/university Presidents to receive a PhD. For most of Ashmead's career she was married to the Haverford College professor and writer John Ashmead.