Daphne Achilles

Daphne Achilles was one of the Columbia University students on Edith Porada's expedition to Phlamoudhi in north-east Cyprus, which ran from 1970 to 1973¹. In the field she and the registrar Corethia Qualls supervised the laboratory in the Phlamoudhi schoolhouse, where the finds were washed and the sherds counted¹.

Porada gave Vounari to Selma Al-Radi and Melissa to Achilles. Once Al-Radi's thesis and publication appeared in 1983, Achilles was the only person left with research duties over a collection that lay mostly in New York. The laboratory space shrank, the material moved several times (once into a flooded room), and chronic illness slowed the work¹.

In his closing tribute to the expedition, Robert Merrillees wrote that no one took so much care, or paid so large a price, to see that the sherds and records survived their troubled storage at Columbia. Merrillees named the Wallach Gallery exhibition, the symposium and the 2008 volume Views from Phlamoudhi, Cyprus as the vindication of that care. She supplied photographs for the volume¹.