Ethel M. Hunter

Ethel Hunter, an Australian graduate, was recruited in 1953 by the St Andrews/Liverpool Expedition to Palaepaphos (Kouklia) to replace G. R. H. Wright in the excavation of tombs; at first she worked under the co-director T. B. Mitford¹. With Mitford she excavated Tombs II to XI at Asproyi (Tomb I was dug in 1951), supervision of individual graves being shared among Mitford, Anne Battershill, Charles Burney and Hunter, and the two found and dug Tombs XII to XIV at Evreti, where Wright had worked in 1952¹.

Late in the 1953 season they came upon the Kaminia cemetery. Hunter wrote to J. R. Stewart in Australia on 1 September 1953: "we found a LC III cemetery, four days before the end, so Terence and I carried on"¹. H. W. Catling thanked "the late Ethel Hunter who with Terence Mitford directed the 1953 Asproyi and Kaminia excavations"¹.

She wrote the tomb descriptions in 1953 and 1954, taking them substantially from her Glasgow dissertation, and an offer to publish the Evreti, Asproyi and Kaminia finds was made to her in 1953; she did not publish them. In 1958 Mitford invited Catling to publish all the Expedition's tombs, and his volume of 2020 retained her descriptions while judging some of her interpretations unsound, among them her distinction between Mycenaean and native fabrics and her reading of Asproyi Tomb III as unusual¹.