Frank Stubbings, who died on October 29 at the age of 90, was the last of a distinguished group of British scholars who began a lifetime's work in Greek Bronze Age archaeology before the Second World War.

Vincent Desborough, Vronwy Hankey and Helen Waterhouse were fellow students with Stubbings at the British School at Athens; all were taught or influenced by Professor Alan Wace, the excavator of Mycenae, to work on the Mycenaean civilisation, primarily its highly attractive and widely exported pottery.

Frank Henry Stubbings, the closest to Wace, lived his whole academic life in Cambridge. He was born on March 8 1915 and educated at the Perse School before going up up to Emmanuel College in 1933 to read for the Classical Tripos. There he won the Porson Prize for Greek verse composition and the Chancellor's Medal for Classics.

After graduation (with a First) he was admitted as a student at Athens in 1937, taking part in excavations on Ithaca and at Mycenae. His researches were interrupted by the war, through which he served on the staff of the legation in Athens and at the embassy to the Greek Government in Cairo.

Returning to Cambridge in 1945, he took up a fellowship at Emmanuel, where he was director of studies in Classics, before being appointed a University Lecturer in the Classics Faculty in 1949, to teach Prehellenic Archaeology to many generations of students in the old Ark (Museum of Classical Archaeology) in Little St Mary's Lane.

Quiet, modest, always kind and generous with his time and his command of the subject, and of the Classical world and its languages, he was liked and appreciated by everyone.

Alongside his teaching, major publications soon emerged, beginning with The Mycenaean pottery of Attica in 1947. It had been written in 1939 as his research in Greece.

Notwithstanding the publication of Arne Furumark's fundamental Mycenaean pottery volumes in 1941, Stubbings's paper was - and remains - basic for its region.

Meanwhile he had turned to the extraordinarily prolific export of Mycenaean wares to the Near East; his study was completed in 1947, became his doctoral dissertation and was published in 1951 as Mycenaean Pottery from the Levant (CUP).

Although more has been discovered since and much further work was done by Hankey and, more recently, by Professor Albert Leonard, Stubbings's fine study remains a sine qua non. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1955.

In the 1950s Homeric archaeology, essentially arguments that the material culture and geography of the Homeric poems find real life correspondence in Late Bronze Age Mycenaean civilisation, received expression in a prolific series of books. A Companion to Homer, edited by Wace and Stubbings (1962), formed a large climax to this approach.

Later he published an elegant little book, choicely illustrated, on Prehistoric Greece (1972). In parallel with his Mycenaean life, meanwhile, Stubbings devoted himself to his college.

From 1959 he was Librarian, in 1965-1969 Vice-Master, and subsequently a Life Fellow. After (formal) retirement in 1980 he became Honorary Keeper of the College Library's special collections, an unstinting and widely known source of help to users. In 1993 the college printed his study The Graham Watson Collection of Colour-plate Books at Emmanuel College Cambridge.

On the wider Cambridge scene he served as University Orator from 1974 to 1982, continuing the traditional delivery of orations in Latin. At a somewhat less elevated level there appeared in 1991 Bedders, Bulldogs and Bedells, a glossary of Cambridge words and usages. Stubbings had published this at his own expense: four years later Cambridge University Press reissued it, at their request.

The Cambridge Bibliographical Society was a natural home too. Stubbings published a number of articles in the society's Transactions and was president from 1981 to 1991.

While at the British School at Athens, Stubbings met Joan Laing, who was studying the ivories from Humphrey Payne's wonderfully productive excavations in the Sanctuary of Hera at Perachora overlooking the Gulf of Corinth.

They were married in 1945. His wife and their two daughters survive him.