Stanley Casson

| image = Stanley Casson as Major.jpg | alt = A middle-aged man in military uniform, wearing three medals and a major's rank. One is overlaid with the oak leaf denoting a mention in dispatches. | caption = Photographed as a major during the Second World War | birth_date = 1889 | death_date = (for Casson's age).}} | module = | rank = Lieutenant colonel | battles = * First World War ** Western Front ** Macedonian front * Second World War ** German invasion of the Netherlands ** Greco-Italian War ** German invasion of Greece ** Battle of Crete

| module =

}} | resting_place = Fairpark cemetery, Newquay | education = | influences = | awards = Order of the Redeemer | workplaces = | spouse = | children = 1 (Jennifer) }}

Stanley Casson (1889–17 April 1944) was an English classical archaeologist. Educated at Ipswich School and at Merchant Taylors' School in Hertfordshire, he attended Lincoln College, Oxford, on an exhibition, where he studied both archaeology and anthropology. He continued his studies at St John's College, Oxford, and the British School at Athens (BSA), where he pursued a then-unusual interest in modern Greek historical anthropology.

During the First World War, Casson served as an officer in the East Lancashire Regiment, and was wounded on the Western Front in 1915. He subsequently transferred as a staff officer to the Macedonian front under George Milne, where he undertook archaeological excavations at Chauchitza and helped to establish the rules and procedures for heritage protection in the area during wartime. He also served in Turkestan, was one of the first Allied officers to enter Constantinople after the Ottoman surrender of November 1918, and was mentioned in dispatches. Following his demobilisation, he became the assistant director of the BSA from 1919 until 1922, took a fellowship in 1920 at New College, Oxford, and lectured widely in person and on BBC radio on archaeological matters.

During the inter-war period, he carried out excavations on behalf of the British Academy in the Hippodrome of Constantinople, and held temporary posts at the University of Bristol and at Bowdoin College in the United States. He returned to military service shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, joining the Intelligence Corps as an officer and instructor. He was almost captured during the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, and was subsequently posted to Greece as the chief intelligence officer of No. 27 Military Mission, the British reporting mission to the country. In Greece, he served on the staff of Henry Maitland Wilson and was again almost captured during the Battle of Crete in May 1941. He subsequently joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and was serving as the SOE's liaison officer in Greece when he was killed in an aircraft crash on 17 April 1944.

Casson's academic interests and publications were eclectic: outside the archaeology of Classical Greece, he published the earliest major English work on Thrace, and wrote widely on Byzantine art. He published articles in both the scholarly and the popular press, and wrote ''Murder by Burial'', a detective novel with archaeological and anti-fascist themes, in 1938. Provided by Wikipedia