J. Richard Steffy

J. Richard Steffy reassembled the Kyrenia ship, the late fourth-century BC wreck that stayed in Cyprus, from its conserved timbers, working with Robin Piercy. Michael Katzev directed the excavations of 1968 and 1969, after which hull members were raised and conserved in polyethylene glycol, and nearly 6,000 fragments were catalogued, photographed and drawn full size¹. Once part of the conservation was complete, Steffy moved to Cyprus with his family in 1972 to help reassemble the hull, and in September 1972 he and Piercy laid the first keel fragment³. By the end of 1973 the Katzevs, Piercys, Basses and Steffys all lived in Cyprus³.

After the 1974 military intervention Katzev's team left. Steffy and Piercy could finish only through the help of the US Embassy and the United Nations, and the reassembly was completed in 1975⁴. The hull implied a vessel about 14 m long, with a beam of 4 m and a weight of about 25 tons, and it remains on display in Kyrenia Castle⁴.

In 1985 Steffy published the interim report on the hull in the American Journal of Archaeology, arguing that the ship was built in an alternating sequence, not a purely shell-first one; the article gives his address as the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University and credits Piercy's photographs¹. Later work questioned his estimate of the height of the hold⁴. Away from Cyprus he studied the Galilee boat and co-edited the report on the Athlit ram, published in 1990⁵. His dates of birth and death are not recorded.