Claude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer

Claude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer dug the Vounous cemetery and the town of Enkomi, and shared the finds among museums in Nicosia, Paris and Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He was born in Strasbourg on 6 March 1898 and died in Saint-Germain-en-Laye on 25 August 1982¹⁶. An Alsatian, he trained in European prehistory at Strasbourg and married Odile Forrer, eldest daughter of Robert Forrer; she ran the camp on his expeditions. René Dussaud sent him to Minet el-Beida and Ras Shamra. He served with the Free French in England during the war, entered the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1953, and in 1954 took a chair of Near Eastern archaeology at the Collège de France that was created for him³.

Vounous and Enkomi, 1932 to 1935

Schaeffer first came to Cyprus in 1932 to look for parallels to the trade evidence from Minet el-Beida and Ras Shamra³. In 1933 he dug at Vounous, near Bellapais. Porphyrios Dikaios records that the National Museums of France obtained permission that year to excavate in collaboration with the Cyprus Museum, and that he and Schaeffer directed the work⁵. Dunn-Vaturi writes that Schaeffer acted in the name of the Louvre and, with Dikaios, cleared about thirty tombs, numbered 49 to 79⁶.

In 1934 he began work at Enkomi on behalf of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and found the Late Bronze Age town there⁴. His results appeared in Missions en Chypre, 1932-1935 (1936), which Dunn-Vaturi says he regarded as a travel account; the complete catalogue of the Vounous tombs stayed unpublished^6,17.

Dividing the finds

The 1933 finds were divided between the Cyprus Museum, the Louvre and the museum at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Caubet cites Louvre numbers AO 17512, 17513 and 17517 among the Vounous pieces, and records that finds from Enkomi Building 18 went to the Louvre by the same division: a group of Mycenaean pottery (AO 18591), weapons and tools, and the bronze banqueting god (AM 2190-2191)⁸. Vounous and Enkomi pieces also served as Louvre samples for deposits in France and abroad; AO 17539 is on deposit at Cannes^7,9. Schaeffer also took the Lefkoniko material from John Linton Myres's 1913 work and gave it to Saint-Germain⁸.

Judith Powell reports what J. R. B. Stewart was told in Paris in the mid-1950s: that the agreement with the Cyprus Department of Antiquities gave Schaeffer half of all the material Dikaios excavated, and that Schaeffer thought this explained why Dikaios no longer worked at the site¹. Caubet describes the 1933 division as one among three institutions rather than a half share⁸.

Powell writes that Schaeffer agreed to hand his Vounous finds to Stewart for study. Stewart and Robert Merrillees spent five weeks cataloguing Vounous and other Cypriot material in the Louvre storeroom and in the basement of Schaeffer's house at Saint-Germain-en-Laye¹. After Stewart's death in 1962 Cambitoglou asked Eve Stewart to return "Schaeffer's Vounous material"¹. Dunn-Vaturi later received the catalogue and published it as SIMA 130 in 2003⁶.

Enkomi from 1946

Schaeffer resumed work at Enkomi in 1946 for the CNRS. He uncovered a Cyclopean wall, and on 19 November 1947 a hoard of bronzes in a large building in the northern part of the site⁴. In November 1947 he agreed with the Cypriot authorities, then under A. H. S. Megaw as Director, to form a joint Franco-Cypriot mission, with Dikaios leading the Department's side from 1948. The agreement ended at Schaeffer's request on 30 July 1951, after disagreements over the chronology of the town and his proposal that the finds be recorded communally, and the two sides continued to dig separately^4,10. The French expedition ran until 1971, and Olivier Pelon took over in 1972¹².

Merrillees lists Schaeffer among the customers of the Famagusta collector George Basil Palma, from whom he acquired two cylinder seals, one of them in 1949². Schaeffer also wrote that the Cyprus Museum's full-size ox-hide ingot, given by Palma in 1939, had been saved from a hoard found clandestinely some years before 1952 at Enkomi Ayios Iakovos. Merrillees thinks Schaeffer was misinformed about where the ingot went afterwards, and notes that the museum's ingot has no authenticated provenance².

In 1958 he presented Enkomi pottery to the Ashmolean Museum, among them a Late Cypriot II bowl, AN1958.57¹⁵. The National Museum in Beirut holds about ten vases from his 1949 Enkomi campaign, entered as gifts of Schaeffer in 1958⁷.