Under the Mediterranean: Opening Addresses and Keynote on Honor Frost

This first session of the October 2017 conference Under the Mediterranean, held at the University of Cyprus to mark the centenary of the birth of Honor Frost in Nicosia, brings together the opening addresses and the introductory keynote lecture.

A Vice-Rector of the University of Cyprus opens the proceedings by reviewing ten years of maritime archaeology at the university, first endowed by the Thetis Foundation and supported by the Honor Frost Foundation through grants for fieldwork, student scholarships and the Maritime Archaeology Research Laboratory. Alison Cathie, chair of the foundation, outlines the projects funded since the foundation was established in 2011 from the sale of Frost's art collection. In Cyprus these include the rescue of the Kyrenia ship, excavations on the Mazotos and Nissia shipwrecks, conservation at the Cyprus Department of Antiquities, coastal landscape surveys at Dreamer's Bay and Akrotiri Salt Lake, a study of Late Bronze Age stone anchors at Maroni-Tsaroukkas, and the publication by Jean-Yves Empereur of the ancient port of Amathus.

Despina Pilides, Curator of Antiquities, explains the 2014 amendment to the Antiquities Law, which extended legal protection and survey requirements across Cyprus's territorial waters, exclusive economic zone and continental shelf in line with the 2001 UNESCO Convention, and describes collaboration with oil and gas companies to evaluate geophysical datasets and a European-funded project to make the submerged harbour of Amathus accessible to visitors. Giorgos Papasavvas, head of the Department of History and Archaeology, speaks on the university's undergraduate and postgraduate training in maritime archaeology, after which co-organisers Stella Demesticha and Lucy Blue introduce the conference programme and its links to the earlier Tropis symposia.

In the keynote lecture, Patrice Pomey traces Honor Frost's career from her background in ballet design in London and her first dive in a Wimbledon well to her training on the French Riviera with Georges Barnier and Frédéric Dumas on the Chrétienne A and Grand Congloué wrecks. Working as a draughtsman for Kathleen Kenyon at Early Bronze Age Jericho in 1957 taught her to treat wrecks, like rock-cut tombs, as closed assemblages. Pomey follows her work on Bronze Age stone anchors, including votive anchors at Byblos, Ugarit and Kition, her surveys of Levantine ports at Tyre, Sidon and Arwad, the UNESCO mission to the port of Alexandria, her participation in the 1960 Cape Gelidonya excavation, the Mortar Wreck in Malta, and her excavation and long campaign for the conservation of the Punic warships at Marsala.