Hanfmann, George M. A.

Hanfmann, George M. A. (Maxim Anossov)

(1911–88) archaeologist; born in St. Petersburg, Russia. After his family fled Russia in 1917, he was educated first in Lithuania and then at the University of Berlin, Germany, where he earned his doctorate in 1934. Fleeing Hitler's Germany for the United States, he taught at Harvard (1935–82), after earning a second doctorate at Johns Hopkins (1935). His monumental work, The Seasons Sarcophagus at Dumbarton Oaks (1951), was a seminal work in the iconography of ancient sarcophagi, but he is best remembered as the director of the excavations at Sardis, Turkey (1958–82) and for his restoration of that site's Roman bath-gymnasium-synagogue complex.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.