May–December 1954

3 Dec 1954Dr. J. Lawrence Angel 165 W. Durham St. Philadelphia, 19, Pa.

Dear Larry:

Peter Megaw has written recently about Curium skeletal material. For one thing, about the request of Professor Hjortsjö to have our bones shipped to him in Sweden to study for his corpus of ancient Cypriot skulls. As I understand it, second-handedly of course, you have no objection to our letting him work on anything which you have already studied. We on our side have no objection to his studying anything you are willing to release to him, provided there is no expense to us in connection with it, as I believe there would not be.

I think I should, however, make it perfectly clear that we regard you as having the priority on any of the skeletal material from Curium and that we certainly want you to be the one to publish it, if you are willing to do so. Accordingly, we have no particular interest in having Hjortsjö work on it, and will be entirely guided by your wishes in the matter.

Would you, then, let me know what answer you would like me to give Peter? (a) if you are willing for us to release bones to Hjortsjö, (b) if so, which? I have a copy of your report of May, 1949, on Curium material here. I do not know whether or not you would be willing to release any or all of the material listed there.

Peter also writes about the new Sotira material. I plan to authorize him to send them to us for you to study (transport at our expense), since I understand you would like to work on them here.

Since we are undertaking to do this, it seems to me a good idea to have him forward also any other Curium skeletal material which you didn't have time to study as fully as you wished, as well as the bones from a new Bamboula grave excavated this past summer. Would you let me know your views on these matters.

Bamboula, of course, is in preparation for publication. Jack Benson worked at Curium on it all last year and is here for all this year to work on material here. When he is ready, perhaps next summer, he and Saul Weinberg will get together to coordinate their results.

Jack will also be working on Kalorziki graves. In this connection he asks me to enquire if you have any information on any skeletal material from these tombs, which were dug largely before the war. He found extremely little in the way of bones from them in storage at Curium.

Best regards -