Edgar J. Peltenburg

Edgar Peltenburg founded the Lemba Archaeological Project in 1976, and Desmond Morris credits him with the Lemba Lady of that year^6,10. He went on digging in the Paphos district for the best part of forty years^1,4.

He was born in Montreal on 28 May 1942¹. He took his BA in ancient history and archaeology at Birmingham in 1963 and his PhD there in 1968, on Near Eastern faience and vitreous materials, a subject he kept returning to^1,2. He taught briefly at McGill in 1963-64 and was a research fellow at Birmingham from 1965 to 1969^1,2. His first Cypriot fieldwork was at Philia-Drakos, alongside Trevor Watkins^1,2. In 1969 he became a lecturer at Glasgow, also serving as resident tutor for Argyll^1,2.

Vrysi and the move to Paphos

In 1969 a Birmingham and Glasgow expedition began excavating the Neolithic coastal settlement of Ayios Epiktitos-Vrysi near Kyrenia, directed by Peltenburg and P. S. Gelling^5,7. From 1972 Glasgow worked there under Peltenburg alone⁷. Kiely lists the Birmingham, Liverpool and Ashmolean museums among the sponsors, and adds that Edinburgh University dug at Kataliontas-Kourvellos in 1972⁴. The events of 1974 curtailed the Vrysi work^1,2.

In 1976 the Glasgow mission began work at Lemba-Lakkous⁶. The Lemba Archaeological Project followed Lakkous with Kissonerga-Mosphilia from 1979, then Kissonerga-Mylouthkia and the Souskiou cemeteries^1,4,9. At Souskiou-Vathyrkakas, Kiely describes excavation together with the Department of Antiquities in 1991 and again from 1994 to 1997⁴. The Mylouthkia work fed into the discussion of the earliest colonisation of the island^1,2. The Lemba Experimental Village, a set of house reconstructions directed by Gordon Thomas, operated within the project¹⁵. The results appeared in the SIMA series, beginning with Excavations at Lemba Lakkous, 1976-1983 in 1985, followed by volumes on Mosphilia (1998), Mylouthkia (2003) and Souskiou-Vathyrkakas (2007)^20,23,24,25. With Diane Bolger and others he published Figurine Makers of Prehistoric Cyprus, on Souskiou, in 2019¹⁶.

Collections and catalogues

Peltenburg also catalogued museum holdings of Cypriot antiquities. With Vassos Karageorghis he published "Some Cypriote vases in Glasgow" in 1976¹⁸, and in 1981 he published Cypriot Antiquities in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery¹⁹. Morris lists both in his bibliography and uses a Birmingham figurine as a link in the sequence of cruciform figurines¹⁰. In 1991 he published The Burrell Collection: Western Asiatic Antiquities, which Kiely says includes the Cypriot collection^4,22.

He gave small excavation finds to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Its records credit "Dr. Edgar G. Peltenburg" with an axe labelled Kissonerga-Mosphilia (AN1979.62, 1979) and a fragment of a Red-on-White bowl from Mylouthkia (AN1978.39, 1978)^11,12. Contemporary reports and these credit lines give his middle initial as G.; later usage has J., and Kiely and the obituaries treat them as one man^1,4.

Edinburgh

He moved from Glasgow to Edinburgh in the later 1970s: Philip dates the move to 1978, Caubet and Thomas to 1975^1,2. In 1988 he hosted a conference on early Cyprus at Edinburgh, held with an exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland curated by Elizabeth Goring, and the papers were published as Early Society in Cyprus in 1989^2,4,21. From 1992 he also excavated at Jerablus Tahtani on the Euphrates in Syria². He received a personal chair in 1994 and retired in 2007 as emeritus professor^1,2. Among his Edinburgh doctoral students were Louise Maguire (1991) and Müge Şevketoğlu (1999)⁴. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Society of Antiquaries of London and of Scotland, and a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences².

Caubet and Thomas count twelve books, six edited volumes and 96 articles, with another 40 written jointly². His festschrift, edited by Bolger and Maguire, appeared in 2010^1,4. Peltenburg died on 14 August 2016^1,2.