J. S. Last

J. S. Last was the surveyor who drew the plans at Khirokitia in 1938 and 1939 and for the Pennsylvania excavation at Kourion. Mitford and Iliffe's list of the 1950 Kouklia expedition names him as "Col. J. S. Last of Episkopi, Surveyor"⁴; Maier calls him a retired colonel who did survey work for several expeditions¹⁴. His forenames are printed differently from source to source, and his dates of birth and death are not recorded.

Costello names him as architect of George McFadden's Kourion mission for the University Museum of Pennsylvania, and notes that his plan of all the Pennsylvania trenches, published in Mitford 1971, later helped Soren relocate one of them¹. For Porphyrios Dikaios he did all the survey work at Khirokitia over two campaigns in 1938 and 1939, including the site and general plans, unpaid, with Elias Markou assisting². Released from Kourion for a short period, he also made the field plan at Sotira³. In 1950 he was surveyor to the Kouklia expedition of Terence Mitford and J. H. Iliffe, and found an inscribed stone at Yerakarka that spring^4,5.

For the Department of Antiquities he investigated the Mantissa locality at Kouklia in 1954, where house-builders had already removed the contents of earlier tombs⁶, and assisted A. H. S. Megaw at Kato Paphos in 1957⁷. From 1963 he was in charge of clearing the Kourion stadium, after McFadden's death had stopped the Pennsylvania work^8,10, and Vassos Karageorghis called him honorary curator of Kourion in 1966¹².

At Episkopi he kept a small collection. A Kourion cippus lost since before 1916 reappeared in his possession in 1958⁵, and in 1964 Karageorghis published a Bichrome V dinos from Trapeza in the "Collection J. S. Last"¹¹. By 1969 he was described as "the late J. S. Last", and that year items from his collection entered the Cyprus Museum^9,13. His paper on the ancient water supply of Kourion appeared in 1975¹⁶.