Jennifer M. Webb

Jennifer M. Webb of La Trobe University in Melbourne dug Bronze Age and Chalcolithic sites in Cyprus and catalogued the Cypriot objects that had reached museums in Australia. She describes herself as co-leader, with David Frankel, of the La Trobe excavations in Cyprus². Her date of birth and training are not recorded.

Catalogues of Australian collections

Her first book was the catalogue of the Cypriote antiquities in the Abbey Museum, Queensland, published in 1986 as Corpus of Cypriote Antiquities 12 and Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology XX^12,17. In 1997 she followed it with Cypriote Antiquities in Australian Collections I, Corpus of Cypriote Antiquities 18, which included the Cypriot pieces in the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney^13,18. She catalogued the Nicholson's Cypriot holdings again in 2001, numbering the entries from 1 to over 370, and later writers cite objects by those "Webb" numbers^3,4. Barker and Merrillees, working on the museum's pieces derived from the Cesnola collections, relied on the catalogue and corrected some of its attributions of objects lent from Cambridge⁴.

Outside Australia she wrote the cylinder-seals chapter, pages 25 to 91, of Courtois and Webb's Les cylindres-sceaux d'Enkomi, published at Nicosia in 1987¹⁴. In 2011 she is named among the collaborators on Vassos Karageorghis's catalogue of the collection of Angelos Tsirides and Emily Tsirides, and with Karageorghis she wrote its chapter on the Early and Middle Bronze Age, pages 20 to 90^7,8. In 2012 she contributed an essay on the Australian contribution to the archaeology of the Early and Middle Bronze Age in Cyprus to the Nicholson Museum's exhibition catalogue Aphrodite's Island².

Excavation with David Frankel

The four excavations were all run with Frankel, funded by the Australian Research Council and staffed by La Trobe students². At Marki-Alonia, Webb gives the dates as 1990 to 2000², while a 1995 survey of work in Cyprus lists Frankel as director with Webb assisting⁵. At Deneia in 2003 and 2004 the team surveyed and sampled Bronze Age cemeteries that had been looted, recording 1,356 tomb shafts². In 2006 and 2007 they made test excavations at the Chalcolithic site of Politiko-Kokkinorotsos².

In 2008 forty-seven Early Bronze Age tombs were excavated at Psematismenos-Trelloukkas, and the Department of Antiquities, through Giorgos Georgiou, gave La Trobe responsibility for their conservation, documentation and publication².

Publishing other diggers' tombs

Webb also published excavations dug by others. With Frankel she issued Porphyrios Dikaios's 1942 excavation at Ambelikou-Aletri as Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology 138 in 2013, and she published the tombs at Karmi dug in 1961 by James Rivers Barrington Stewart^1,8. Her volume Lapithos Vrysi tou Barba, Cyprus: Early and Middle Bronze Age Tombs Excavated by Menelaos Markides appeared in 2018 as Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology 148, with contributions from several other authors; it covers the tombs that Menelaos Markides opened in 1913 and 1917, and its figures include the plans of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition's tombs of 1927 at the same cemetery⁹. A second volume, Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology 152, on the tombs excavated in 1913, followed in 2020¹⁰.

In 2014 she edited Structure, Measurement and Meaning, a volume of studies on prehistoric Cyprus in honour of Frankel, as Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology 143. Frankel's reply in the volume credits her with initiating it¹.