Sir William Ridgeway (1853-1926) was an Anglo-Irish archaeologist and classical scholar. Disney Professor of Archaeology and Brereton Reader in Classics at the University of Cambridge, he was Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Fellow of the British Academy and President of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He contributed articles to the Encyclopedia Biblica (1903), Encyclopædia Britannica (1911) and wrote The Origin of Metallic Currency and Weight Standards (1892), and The Early Age of Greece (1901) which were significant works in Archaeology and Anthropology.
Ridgeway's essay Greek Trade Routes to Britain, which today we propose to modern readers, was published in 1890 in the first volume of Folk-Lore, a quarterly review of Myth, Tradition, Institution, & Custom. It is a fundamental work for understanding and discovering the ancient commercial relationships and mercantile routes between the Greek world and the British Isles.