Ellen Herscher

Ellen Herscher published the Bronze Age tombs from the University of Pennsylvania's 1931 dig at Lapithos. She was an American graduate student when she first worked in Cyprus, and in the 1975 volume where she published them she thanked Vassos Karageorghis for first introducing her to "the earth of Cyprus"¹.

Early work on Cypriot pottery

Her first named publication, in the Department of Antiquities' Report for 1973, dealt with a localized Red-and-Black Polished ware from the western Karpas. She based it on 22 items, which she attributed to three individual potters, labelled A, B and C³. David Morris later gathered about 200 further pieces of the ware and accepted her identification of the potters, although he disputed her dating¹⁹.

In 1973 she also supplied Karageorghis with information on items in the Pierides Collection at Larnaca, for his catalogue of it¹⁷. The following year Karageorghis named "Miss Ellen Herscher" and Jennifer M. Webb among the graduate students in his last campaign at Kition before the 1974 invasion¹³. She also helped complete the bibliographical references of Cypriote Antiquities in San Francisco Bay Area Collections, by Karageorghis and Darrell A. Amyx, and edited its text for the printer¹⁸.

The Lapithos tombs

The University Museum's excavation at Lapithos-Vrysi tou Barba in 1931 was carried out by Bert Hodge Hill, with Lucy Talcott, Virginia Grace and Dorothy Cox. In "New Light from Lapithos" (1975), Herscher surveyed the 37 other tombs of the excavation, studying them with the permission of Rodney S. Young, the museum's curator, and Kyriakos Nicolaou of the Cyprus Museum¹. The work became her unpublished University of Pennsylvania doctoral dissertation of 1978, The Bronze Age Cemetery at Lapithos, Vrysi tou Barba, Cyprus^5,20. Pennsylvania was awarded the Iron Age material from the cemetery, and the Bronze Age tombs were left to her²⁰.

Ceramics for other people's excavations

From 1977 she worked as a ceramic specialist for Ian A. Todd's Vasilikos Valley Project, where she suggested down-dating some of the Kalavasos village-tomb material to the Middle Bronze Age¹⁵. Her paper on south-coast ceramic styles at the end of the Middle Cypriot period appeared in the Report of the Department of Antiquities in 1976, and in 1988 she published the Middle Bronze Age tombs at Larnaca-Ayios Prodromos, which later catalogues cite as "Kition in the Middle Bronze Age"^4,7.

For museum collections she wrote the Bronze Age introduction to Norma Kershaw's 1983 catalogue of the Ringling Museum's Cypriot antiquities at Sarasota; Diana Buitron wrote the Iron Age chapter and David Gordon Mitten the Hellenistic and Roman one¹⁶.

The Cesnola galleries

In 1995 Herscher resumed the American Journal of Archaeology's survey "Archaeology in Cyprus", which appeared in volume 99, pp. 257-294⁹. In July/August 2000 she published "New Triumphs for 'General' Cesnola" in Archaeology, a piece on the Metropolitan Museum's new Cypriot galleries. Karageorghis, who replied in the Cahiers du Centre d'Etudes Chypriotes, quotes her as arguing that Cypriots, "rather than demand the collection's return", had paid for the new installation and its catalogue^10,14. The collection in question is the one assembled by Luigi Palma di Cesnola.

Sotira Kaminoudhia

With Stuart Swiny and George Rapp, Herscher co-edited Sotira Kaminoudhia: An Early Bronze Age Site in Cyprus (CAARI Monograph 4, 2003) and wrote its ceramics chapter, pages 145 to 204^11,12.