Anna Marguerite McCann, born on May 11, 1933, and passing on February 12, 2017, carved out a place in American intellectual history as a pioneering art historian and archaeologist whose career bridged the formal study of classical antiquity with the physically demanding world of underwater exploration. At a time when both disciplines were still finding their boundaries, she pushed those boundaries simultaneously, becoming a foundational figure in a field that barely existed when she entered it.
Her education was rigorous and classically oriented. McCann attended the Rye Country Day School in Rye, New York, before earning a Bachelor of Arts in art history with a minor in Classical Greek from Wellesley College in 1954. A Fulbright Scholarship then carried her to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, where she immersed herself in the world of antiquity before returning stateside to pursue graduate work at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. In 1957, she completed her Master of Arts degree with a thesis titled "Greek Statuary Types in Roman Historical Reliefs," a work that foreshadowed her lifelong preoccupation with Roman sculpture and the material culture of the ancient Mediterranean world. She later earned a Ph.D. from Indiana University in both art history and classics in 1965, cementing a dual expertise that would define her subsequent scholarship.
Before the ink had dried on her doctorate, McCann had already begun diving into ancient waters — literally. In the early 1960s, she took up scuba diving alongside the legendary oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, joining expeditions to explore submerged Roman shipwrecks near Marseille. Underwater archaeology was then a nascent discipline, and it was, as her colleagues noted, largely dominated by men. McCann's entry into that world was not just a personal achievement; it marked a turning point. Between 1961 and 1962, she participated in the excavation of the seventh-century Yassi Ada shipwreck in Bodrum, Turkey, in collaboration with the National Geographic Society and the University of Pennsylvania, contributing to one of the era's most important underwater archaeological projects.
Her years at the American Academy in Rome as a Rome Prize Fellow between 1964 and 1966 proved transformative for her scholarly output. During that time, she expanded her Master's thesis into a full-length study, The Portraits of Septimius Severus, A.D. 193–211. Decades later, her colleagues would describe this work as still the major scholarly authority on that emperor's portraiture, a testimony to the depth and durability of her research.
After Rome, McCann entered academia proper. She taught at the University of Missouri from 1966 to 1971, followed by a position at the University of California, Berkeley from 1971 to 1974. These were productive years not only in the classroom but also in the field, as her archaeological curiosity extended to the study of Roman pottery through her active involvement in an international learned society dedicated to that subject. In 1974, she joined the curatorial staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where she led a lecture program on archaeology. Her publication Roman Sarcophagi in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, produced during her time there, won the Outstanding Book Award from the Association of American University Presses and was recognized as an Outstanding Art Book by the Thomas J. Watson Library in 1978.
Parallel to her work on sculpture and sarcophagi, McCann conducted archaeological excavations at Cosa, a Latin colony in Tuscany, over a span of more than two decades — from 1965 to 1987. The culmination of that field work was the 1987 collaborative volume The Roman Port and Fishery of Cosa: A Center of Ancient Trade, a work that earned both the Association of American University Presses' Outstanding Book Award and the 1989 James R. Wiseman Book Award from the Archaeological Institute of America.
McCann's commitment to underwater archaeology grew steadily throughout her career, and she formalized it institutionally in 1985 by founding the Committee for Underwater Archaeology within the Archaeological Institute of America, of which she was a Board of Trustees member. Four years later, in 1989, she became the archaeological director of the JASON Project, working alongside oceanographer Robert Ballard to survey ancient shipwrecks at the Skerki Bank in the Strait of Sicily. The partnership yielded a 1994 publication widely regarded as the first to document archaeological research conducted in deep waters, a milestone in the evolution of the discipline. McCann and Ballard returned to Skerki Bank in 1997, discovering additional wrecks and reinforcing the scientific value of deep-water archaeological survey.
Recognition came in full measure in 1998, when the Archaeological Institute of America awarded her its Gold Medal Award — the highest honor in American archaeology — at a ceremony where she was also presented with a Festschrift, a collection of scholarly essays assembled in her honor by colleagues and former students. McCann subsequently taught at Boston University from 1997 to 2001 and served as a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2001 to 2007, mentoring a new generation of scholars in the twin arts of excavation and analysis.
Beyond her formal academic identity, McCann also published under the name Anna McCann Taggart. Her legacy is that of a scholar who combined formidable intellectual rigor with physical courage, spending decades both in the library and beneath the sea in service of understanding the ancient world. She was the first American woman to leave a lasting mark on underwater archaeology, and the depth of her contributions — from Roman sarcophagi to ancient Mediterranean trade routes — remains undiminished.
