Craig Barker

Craig Barker first worked in Cyprus in 1995, as an undergraduate on Professor Green's first season of excavation at the theatre of Nea Paphos¹. He later co-directed the University of Sydney's work there. The 2010 season, the thirteenth, ran under the direction of Barker, Smadar Gabrieli and Emeritus Professor Richard Green, and the 2012 season under Barker and Gabrieli, with 34 team members, the Nicholson Museum and the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens supporting the work^3,4. The finds stay in the Paphos museum¹. He published on the theatre's architecture with G. H. Stennett in 2004 and on Rhodian amphorae from Nea Paphos graves^7,8.

At the Nicholson Museum in Sydney he edited and wrote much of Aphrodite's Island (2012), the catalogue of its Cypriot collection¹. With Robert S. Merrillees he then traced the museum's pieces from the collections of Luigi Palma di Cesnola and Alessandro Palma di Cesnola. They found at least 29 of Luigi's, 24 bought in 1927 and 5 acquired in 1953, and at least 28 of Alessandro's, which came by way of Frank Ransom and a loan from Cambridge in 1947². For the 1927 purchase the Metropolitan Museum selected 23 objects for $342 and charged $290.70, a 15 per cent discount for a public institution, after a subscription fund was raised in Sydney².