Hector Catling

Hector William Catling was born in north London on 26 June 1924, the youngest of four sons, and grew up in the West Country³⁰. After Bristol Grammar School he did four years in the Royal Navy, from 1942 to 1946, and only then read Literae Humaniores at Oxford, between 1946 and 1951³⁰. He had married Elizabeth Salter in 1948³⁰. His Oxford doctorate, on the Cypriot Bronze Age, was supervised by Dorothea Gray³⁰.

The sources disagree on the scholarship that paid for his research: Spawforth says it brought him to Cyprus for three years, 1951 to 1953, funded by the Goldsmiths' Company, while Cadogan describes a two-year Travelling Scholarship from the Goldsmiths' Company for research in Cyprus and visits to museums in Lebanon, Syria and Turkey^30,31. In 1951 he returned to Cyprus as an assistant for a second season to Joan du Plat Taylor on her excavation of the Bronze Age shrine at Myrtou-Pigadhes, whose report has two chapters by him³¹.

For two years he and his wife Elizabeth visited a large number of sites on the island and registered a great many, working mainly from the archives of the Department of Antiquities, and they found new sites by surface survey and reported them in detail to the Department². Şevketoğlu writes that between 1951 and 1953 he followed Einar Gjerstad's records and added another 40 sites to them³⁹. Vassos Karageorghis first met him in 1952, the year Karageorghis was appointed to the Department².

His work on the Kouklia tombs began in 1952, when G. R. H. Wright excavated Evreti Tombs III-XI for the Liverpool City Museum/St Andrews University Expedition¹. He assisted Wright with the preliminary study of their contents, greatly helped by Angeliki Pieridou of the Department of Antiquities¹. Catling described that year in two ways in the same book: his acknowledgements speak of "an official involvement", while his introduction speaks of a visit to Kouklia as Wright was winding up at Evreti and "unofficial work" in the second half of 1952 helping Wright produce an interim report¹. In autumn 1953 the Catlings came back to Oxford, to what he remembered as "a very lean time", with odd jobs in the Ashmolean³¹.

In an interview with Gerald Cadogan at Langford on 9 May 2002, Catling told how the Survey began³¹. "I dreamt this idea. Wouldn't it be wonderful to do this surveying comprehensively? Cyprus is a finite space"³¹. He wrote to A. H. S. Megaw, the Director of Antiquities, to ask whether he would support the idea and any applications for funds, and Megaw answered that he would consider finding the money for Catling to do it under contract, an offer Catling "accepted gleefully"³¹. He then went up to the Colonial Office in London to ask what was happening and told them his story; in the end they agreed that he should go and would pay his passage³¹.

On the way to Cyprus, early in 1955, Megaw arranged for him to spend a fortnight in the storerooms of the Agora excavations in Athens, where he and Elizabeth worked on Roman pottery^30,31. The Cyprus Gazette recorded his appointment as Archaeological Survey Officer, Department of Antiquities, dated 8 February 1955, and his arrival in the Colony on 1 March 1955³². Then EOKA began, and that, Catling said, "pulled the rug out from under our feet"³¹. The Catlings moved into the Hadjiyeorgaki house in mid-April, but the family was later moved to rented quarters in the Lykavitos area³¹.

Megaw earmarked the young custodian at Kourion, Chrysilios Polykarpou, as the first member of Catling's staff³¹. Antonis Markou was taken on, on daily wages³¹. The Survey set out to record everything from the earliest times down to 1700, the period specified in the Antiquities Law³¹. With Elizabeth drawing and measuring, Spawforth writes, he and his small team of Cypriot assistants recorded, unusually for the time, such features as old field terraces and quarries³⁰.

The first field season started in June 1955 at Karpasha, a village the Catlings knew³¹. Megaw reported that year that Catling, working for the Department, had embarked on a survey of sites throughout the island, indexing those already recorded and registering many more by systematic surface exploration³⁵. In that first campaign, over about 100 square miles around Cape Krommyon, he located some 400 sites, about two-thirds of them previously unrecorded³⁵. The sources disagree on the year the field survey began: Spawforth dates its launch to 1956, but Megaw's report for 1955, Cadogan's account and Catling himself, who wrote that the Survey found the site at Mersineri in 1955, all put it in 1955^19,30,31,35.

Kyriakos Nicolaou was appointed Assistant Archaeological Survey Officer, and Catling inducted him³¹. For that purpose, in spring 1957, before going on leave, Catling took him to the upper Yialias valley between Nisou and Pyroi, where they located medieval sites near the Lusignan royal manor at Potamia, which Catling was convinced was another of the big sugar manors³¹. Back from leave in October, he and Nicolaou walked all day at Cape Greco, south of Famagusta, on barren land awaiting a military installation, and found only three scatters of Hellenistic material³¹.

Catling called 1958 "an up and down year, with several rescue excavations, as well as the start of the intercommunal troubles"³¹. In the first half of the year he and Nicolaou explored the foothills of the Kyrenia range between Krini and Sykhari, and Catling resumed his work around Cape Krommyon, on the coast between Ayia Irini and Liveras; Karageorghis's chronicle of these campaigns drew on a report from Catling³⁴. In Karpasha, "a wonderful Maronite village, where we were secure", Antonis Markou insisted that they were Swedes and saw to it that they got their groceries from a man in Dhiorios³¹.

In July 1958, working again in the Cape Krommyon area, Catling found by chance that the owner of the Mersineri land had brought in heavy machinery to make it easier to plough by tractor¹⁹. In agreement with the landowner, Costas Themistokleous of Dhiorios, the Department of Antiquities made a very limited rescue excavation, which revealed a small pottery factory of the seventh or eighth century AD and the settlement it belonged to¹⁹. Catling directed the three-week dig, with Antonis Markou as foreman¹⁹. Also in 1958 he had to make a brief rescue excavation at the Panayia site on the western outskirts of Kormakiti¹⁹. The team stayed in the field until mid-December, and it was his last time in the field³¹.

His contract was to run out at the end of September 1959, and the family left six weeks before that³¹. He had been offered a Bye-Fellowship at Cambridge and then the Ashmolean post in succession to John Boardman, and Elizabeth told him, "if you go to the Ashmolean, you will have security"³¹. By the time he left, he said, the Survey had a complete set of large-scale maps and air photographs of the whole island, and its record forms³¹. Looking back, Catling said they had never settled in what form the Survey would be published when it was finished, "one of its weaknesses, probably"³¹.

In its two main regions, from Morphou to Dhikomo and the Yialias valley, the Survey recorded around 1,500 sites, most of them, Şevketoğlu says, of the Bronze Age^31,39. Karageorghis writes that the programme could not be completed, but that Catling and his staff produced a credible and well documented map of the largest part of the island, mainly from surface material of the prehistoric periods, which helped the Department set priorities for its excavations after Independence². Merrillees calls Catling's gazetteer of Bronze Age sites, published in Opuscula Atheniensia IV in 1962, a permanent source of reference for the settlement pattern of the period, and says it enshrined the place-names that became standard in the literature³. Cadogan judges the Survey "a brilliant, pioneering idea, which anticipated almost all other intensive surveys in the rest of the world"³¹. Karageorghis, who shared an office with him in the Cyprus Museum for nearly five years, adds that they did not always interpret the evidence the same way².

By late summer 1959 Catling was back in Oxford, having accepted a post in the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum³⁰. His title there is given two ways: Spawforth, and Courtois in his notebook for 1963, call him Assistant Keeper, while Karageorghis calls him Senior Assistant Curator^2,30,33. Karageorghis writes that one of his first acts was a drastic renovation of the museum's Cypriot collections, acquired mainly in the first British excavations on the island in the 1890s². He created the Myres Gallery of Ancient Cyprus, which surveyed the island from the Neolithic to medieval times⁴.

The Department of Antiquities permitted him to export some 3,500 provenanced sherds and other items from the Cyprus Survey, ranging from the Neolithic to the Roman period, which, Kiely says, gave the Ashmolean the largest study collection of provenanced sherds outside the island⁴. The museum's records credit him with gifts such as a vessel "from various sites" in 1962 and a potsherd from Akanthou-Moulos in 1970, and a Base Ring juglet came to the museum in 2019 from his bequest, presented by Richard Catling^36,37,38.

His DPhil, examined in 1957 and revised, was published by Oxford University Press in 1964 as Cypriot Bronzework in the Mycenaean World³⁰. Merrillees calls it his magnum opus and says it took the place of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition's volume IV:1 A-D as the essential tool for classifying the bronze artefacts of the period³. In Cyprus in the Neolithic and Bronze Age Periods, which Merrillees calls a masterly synthesis marked by "comprehensiveness, balance and sobriety", he wrote that the proposal to locate Aegean colonies in Cyprus in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC "has never surmounted the obstacle of missing evidence"³.

Spawforth writes that he found a "certain deadliness" in museum work, and in autumn 1971 he took up the Directorship of the British School at Athens in succession to Peter Fraser, a stint of the best part of 18 years, the longest ever³⁰. In 1973 he began a new excavation at the Spartan sanctuary of the Menelaion, where he found inscriptions confirming that Helen was worshipped alongside her husband³⁰.

At the Nicosia symposium "The Mycenaeans in the Eastern Mediterranean" in March and April 1972 he spoke on the Achaean (Mycenaean) colonisation of Cyprus and, the press reports said, insisted that the real colonisation took place in the 12th century BC^3,40,41. The Public Information Office reported that many participants disputed this view, holding that there had been Mycenaean colonies on the island earlier⁴⁰. Merrillees remembers the "never-to-be forgotten dispute" that broke out there between Catling and Claude Schaeffer over the dating of the Mycenaean colonisation and of the ashlar buildings at Enkomi³. Among the synopses printed from the second symposium, on relations between Cyprus and Crete, held in Nicosia from 16 to 22 April 1978, is one by him, "Copper in Cyprus, Bronze in Crete: Some Economic Problems"⁴². His last visit to Cyprus was in 1985, when he presented a paper on Cypriot bronzework at the symposium "Cyprus between the Orient and Occident"³.

He was made OBE in 1980 and CBE in 1989, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens, and in 1986 became an honorary fellow of St John's, his old Oxford college³⁰. On retiring in 1989 the Catlings moved to a house and garden in the Cotswolds village of Langford³⁰. Knossos North Cemetery, with Nicolas Coldstream, appeared in 1996, and Menelaion I, on the Bronze Age levels, in 2009³⁰. Karageorghis writes that he and Coldstream excavated the North Cemetery at Knossos together².

From 1958, at the invitation of Terence Mitford, then co-director of the Expedition, the publication of all the tombs it had excavated was Catling's responsibility, and he worked on it over four well-separated periods¹. The second came in autumn 1958 and spring 1959, when he was, in his own words, a Temporary Officer in the Department of Antiquities; before he left Cyprus, Megaw approved a period of local leave at Kouklia, and Elizabeth helped record the tomb groups in the local museum¹. From 1960 to 1966 his Ashmolean duties and earlier publication commitments kept him from it¹.

In late 1966 R. W. Hamilton, Keeper of the Ashmolean, approved his sabbatical and supported his application to the Leverhulme Foundation for Kouklia study expenses, and grants came from the Court of St Andrews University in 1966 and the British Academy in 1968¹. In the 1966-67 academic year he worked in Nicosia and Kouklia and visited St Andrews, Liverpool and Birmingham¹. Very great difficulty in getting access to the essential parts of the excavation archive frustrated his hope of finishing the bulk of the work by the end of his leave¹. He spent a great deal of energy trying to recover an essential part of the records that had been taken to Australia¹. The third phase ended in 1969¹.

In Merrillees's account, a disagreement over the right to publish the finds of the British excavations at Kouklia, made in the first half of the 1950s under St Andrews University and the Liverpool Museums, frustrated the funded sabbatical of 1966/67 and left Catling with a long disenchantment with the whole undertaking, which mellowed only in his later years³. Merrillees writes that he persuaded Ethel Hunter to part with her university thesis on the dig for Catling's benefit³.

The sources differ on when he took the work up again: Karageorghis writes that after retiring in 1989 he began to work systematically on publishing the material excavated by Iliffe and Mitford, while Catling wrote that other publishing commitments took all his time and that only in 2007 could he begin the fourth and final phase, after an interval approaching forty years^1,2. He received a succession of annual grants from the Institute for Aegean Prehistory in New York for it, and thanked Malcolm Wiener for his interest and support¹. Elizabeth died in 2000, and Karageorghis writes that the loss of the wife who had been his right hand in research worsened his own health^2,30,31.

By Christmas 2009 he had serious heart failure, which kept him from travelling to libraries and steadily reduced his hours at the desk¹. He acknowledged that the long delay had deeply disappointed specialists in the Late Cypriot Bronze Age, and added, "qui s'excuse, s'accuse"¹. In 2011 he wrote to Karageorghis that his aim was to leave a publishable manuscript, and in his last letter, dictated to a secretary on 24 January 2013, he felt that the end was near². Hector Catling died at home in Langford on 15 February 2013, aged 88^2,30.