Andrew McCarthy

Andrew McCarthy opened a new excavation in the foothills of the Paphos district in 2008 and was Director of the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute in Nicosia by 2012. His name also appears in print as A. P. McCarthy and, in one 2015 article, as A. MacCarthy^15,16.

Thomas Kiely describes him as a doctoral graduate of the University of Edinburgh whose work concerned the use of glyptic (carved seals and sealings) in the Near East of the fourth and third millennia BC⁴. He edited Island Dialogues: Cyprus in the Mediterranean Network, volume 21 of the Edinburgh archaeology occasional papers⁹. His earliest Cypriot fieldwork in the record is the 2007 season at Kissonerga-Skalia, reported in the Report of the Department of Antiquities, Cyprus for 2008 with Lindy Crewe, Paul Croft and Lisa Graham¹⁰.

Prastio-Mesorotsos

The Prastio-Mesorotsos Archaeological Expedition began in 2008. Its first preliminary report, for the 2008 season, appeared the following year under McCarthy's name with B. Blakeman, M. Dalton, I. Hill, Lisa Graham and G. Ritchie¹¹. Kiely calls his fieldwork near Prasteio an offshoot of the Souskiou Laona project and says it follows the landscape interests of the Lemba project⁴.

The fifth season ran from 23 June to 28 July 2012, and McCarthy directed it. He reported deposits from the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Early and Middle Bronze Age, together with Late Roman and Byzantine levels. The Early Bronze Age finds included the burial of an infant in a domestic context, and the evidence showed the site abandoned at the start of the Late Bronze Age. The season's results were to appear as a preliminary report in the Department of Antiquities' annual volume¹. He also wrote two studies of the site, "Living with the legacy of death" in J.R.B. Stewart: An Archaeological Legacy and "Landscape resources and site longevity", on Prasteio Mesorotsos and the Dhiarizos valley in prehistory^13,14.

The Institute and the trafficking workshop

The Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute advertised the post of Director from July 2011². McCarthy held it in 2012, when he signed the Prastio report in CAARI News¹, and the 2016 ICAANE abstract booklet still lists him with the Institute and with Edinburgh³. Kiely names Lindy Crewe as his successor⁴.

In 2011 he spoke at a workshop in Nicosia, "Protecting the Cultural Heritage of Cyprus: Joining Efforts in Preventing the Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Heritage", held by the Cyprus Museum and the Archbishop Makarios III Foundation. He asked whether bi-communal cooperation would be a more rational answer to looting than accusation. Summerer and Kaba, introducing The Northern Face of Cyprus (2016), note that nobody from the north of the island had been invited and that his question was not taken up in discussion⁵. He and Despina Pilides edited the proceedings, published in Nicosia in 2014¹⁵. In 2015 he published "The Role of International Organizations in Protecting Cypriot Heritage" in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies¹⁶.

With A. Bernard Knapp and J. M. Webb, he had edited J.R.B. Stewart: An Archaeological Legacy, issued in 2013 as volume 139 of the Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology series¹².