Richard MacGillivray Dawkins (24 October 1871 – 4 May 1955) was a British archaeologist and a scholar of modern Greek dialectology and folklore. His parents, a Royal Navy officer and the heiress of the businessman Simon McGillivray, sent him to board from the age of nine, first at Totnes Grammar School and then at Marlborough College. His time at school was unhappy, and he was largely unsuccessful academically. After leaving Marlborough in 1890, he followed his father's wishes and enrolled to study electrical engineering at King's College, London. This proved no more enjoyable, and he spent his spare time teaching himself languages, both classical and modern. After two years, he dropped out of King's in 1892 to become an apprentice at a Chelmsford electrical company, where he worked until 1897.

In 1898, using money inherited from both parents, Dawkins took a place at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to study classics. This time he was more successful; he graduated in 1902 with a double first, and was awarded a Craven Scholarship to study at the British School at Athens (BSA) for the following academic year. There, he took part in his first archaeological excavations, at Roussolakkos near Palaikastro on Crete, and conducted fieldwork studying Modern Greek dialects. He was elected as a fellow of Emmanuel in 1904, and appointed as director of the BSA in 1906. There, he directed four seasons of excavation at the Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia near Sparta, and further archaeological projects on Crete and other Greek islands.

During the First World War, Dawkins served in Crete as an interpreter and intelligence officer for the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, gathering information on German U-boats and the local population. In 1916, he published Modern Greek in Asia Minor, one of first academic studies of the Cappadocian Greek dialect and one of the last to be published before the ethnic cleansing of Greeks from the region in the early 1920s. In 1919, he was elected the first Bywater Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature in the University of Oxford; he became a fellow of the university's Exeter College in 1922. He taught little, but continued to travel widely in the eastern Mediterranean to study Greek dialects. He published several articles and volumes on modern Greek folklore, started unpublished works on Byzantine history and modern Greek literature, and collected a large assemblage of modern Greek embroideries, which he bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Dawkins's excavations at the Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia were praised for their technical excellence and contribution to the history of Sparta, though delays in their publication meant that some of the methodology and conclusions were obsolete by the time they became public. He has been credited with making important contributions to the discovery of Minoan civilisation on Crete and to the study of Greek folklore and dialectology. He was made a Fellow of the British Academy and awarded the silver cross (the second-highest grade) of the Greek Order of the Redeemer.

Early life and education Richard MacGillivray Dawkins was born on 24 October 1871 in Surbiton in the English county of Surrey. He was the eldest child of Richard Dawkins, a Royal Navy officer, and his wife Mary Louisa, the daughter of the businessman Simon McGillivray and a granddaughter of the politician and journalist Sir John Easthope. In 1878, Dawkins's father retired from the navy and settled in Stoke Gabriel in Devon. Dawkins was initially taught by his mother, whom he later described in his unpublished memoirs as "extremely competent and well read", and later by a governess.

From the age of nine, from 1881 to 1884, Dawkins was educated as a boarder at the nearby Totnes Grammar School. He moved to Marlborough College, a public school in Wiltshire, in 1884. His entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes him as "an awkward, ungainly, and short-sighted boy with a dislike for all forms of organised games which he retained throughout his life", and comments that his schooldays were undistinguished and, apart from his acquisition of a lifelong love of botany, unhappy. He won school prizes in natural history and geography, respectively in 1888 and 1890, but achieved little in classical languages; he later said that he was often close to being required to repeat a year due to poor academic performance.

Leaving Marlborough in 1890, he went up to King's College, London; at his father's direction, he studied electrical engineering. Although academically successful, particularly in mathematics, he was bored by engineering; he began reading books on linguistics and teaching himself languages in his spare time. In July 1892, having completed only two years of his three-year course, he left King's to become an apprentice to Crompton's, an electrical engineering company in Chelmsford which made arc lamps. He continued his amateur linguistic studies during his period with the firm; after his apprenticeship, he became a designer, and remained in this post until 1897.

Following the deaths of both of his parents, Dawkins inherited enough money to take a place at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1898. He chose to study classics on the advice of an acquaintance, who was a priest, and Emmanuel on the recommendation of a friend already studying at the university. His teachers there included Peter Giles, who taught philology, and James Adam, who taught ancient philosophy. He was also taught by Arthur Bernard Cook, known as a scholar of ancient religion, John Percival Postgate, who studied Latin poetry; and the Sanskrit scholar Edward Byles Cowell. His contemporaries and friends included Alan Wace, at Pembroke College, and Frederick William Hasluck at King's; he was also a contemporary of Percy Ure, studying at Gonville and Caius College. Although inexperienced in the conventional academic practice of classics, particularly in translating English into Latin and Greek, he had a good knowledge of both ancient languages and proved skilled in translating from them into English. He was awarded a scholarship in 1899, after his first year of study. He first visited Greece in a thirty-day visit in 1900, in which he saw several classical sites, and wrote up a report of the trip in the Emmanuel College magazine: his account included details of botany, and the observations of contemporary folk culture which would characterise his later academic work. Graduating in 1902 with a double first, he was awarded a Craven Scholarship, worth £50 (), to study at the British School at Athens (BSA) for the following academic year.

British School at Athens

During Dawkins's first period at the BSA, in 1902–1903, he took part in his first archaeological excavations in March–June 1903, at the Minoan site at Roussolakkos near Palaikastro on Crete, led by the BSA's director, Robert Carr Bosanquet. Although initially intent on participating in archaeological work in Greece, he came to concentrate on research into modern Greek dialectology. He spent time in the Dodecanese islands, particularly Karpathos, studying the local dialects; on Karpathos he sought to compare the local dialect with that of eastern Crete, which he had learned while excavating at Roussolakkos.

Dawkins was elected as a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1904. He returned to the Roussolakkos excavation in 1904, 1905 and 1906, and was its director in 1904–1905. During the 1904 season he excavated a Neolithic dwelling and rock-shelter, and transcribed 953  – a form of folk poetry set to music – recited to him by local men. He made his first visit to the monastery of Mount Athos, in northern Greece, in 1905; he would return there in 1931, 1933 and 1935, and publish an account of his time as The Monks of Athens in 1936.

Following Bosanquet's resignation as the BSA's director in July 1905, Dawkins was shortlisted alongside Wace and Duncan Mackenzie, the school's assistant director, to replace him. In a meeting of 13 March, the managing committee described Dawkins as "a capable worker in widely varied directions", and as possessing a better writing style than either Wace or Mackenzie, but as perhaps "a better worker than an inspirer of work in others, and not likely to be strong on the social side". He was, however, appointed. The archaeological historian David Gill considers that a reference written for Dawkins by James Adam, his former teacher, was decisive: Adams praised his former student's teaching abilities and personal character alongside his quality as an archaeologist. Although Arthur Evans, an influential member of the committee, proposed appointing Dawkins on a temporary one-year contract, the committee decided to give him the post for three years, on an annual salary of £500 (). Since Mackenzie had indicated that he would not continue as assistant director if Dawkins were appointed, a replacement needed to be found: the committee gave the decision to Dawkins, who appointed his friend Hasluck, then serving as the school's librarian. In May–June 1906, Dawkins and Hasluck travelled by rail and road from İzmir on Anatolia's southern Aegean coast of to Nicaea in its northwest, carrying out linguistic fieldwork.

Directorship

Dawkins's sister Annie moved to Athens with him, and handled his domestic affairs. During his first summer as director, Dawkins travelled throughout the southern Sporades islands with Wace, recording inscriptions, collecting embroidered artwork, and pursuing Dawkins's interest in modern Greek dialects. Wace put on an exhibition of Greek embroideries at Cambridge University's Fitzwilliam Museum in 1906, whose contents consisted almost entirely of works from his and Dawkins's collections. Dawkins and Wace made another collecting excursion, this time in the Cyclades, in 1907. Collecting embroideries, often in large numbers, remained a feature of Dawkins's life until 1914; he and Wace were unusual among contemporary collectors in the field in that they kept detailed notes and catalogues of their acquisitions.

From 1904, Bosanquet had established a new campaign of excavation in the southern Greek region of Laconia, around the ancient city of Sparta, as the BSA's main archaeological project. After various minor excavations in 1904 and 1905, a major project was initiated in 1906, with Dawkins as assistant director to Bosanquet. The project chiefly aimed to establish the topography of the ancient city, and began on the acropolis, progressing into excavations of two Roman-period buildings, a stoa and the theatre. The excavations revealed the site of the Sanctuary of Athene Chalkioikos, discovered by Guy Dickins in April 1907. From 1906 to 1910, Dawkins directed four excavation seasons at the Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia in the eastern part of the city. The excavation uncovered thousands of objects, dating between the Archaic period () and the third century CE. In 1909, the project excavated at the Menelaion, an eighth-century BCE shrine to the mythical hero Menelaus built over the remains of a Bronze Age site, and discovered some Bronze Age buildings. Dawkins partly excavated one of these in 1910.