Joan du Plat Taylor

Joan du Plat Taylor began at the Cyprus Museum as a volunteer behind the saleroom counter, selling duplicates, and went on to discover the Late Bronze Age mining settlement at Apliki and to dig the sanctuary at Myrtou-Pigadhes^3,12,14. She was born in Glasgow on 26 June 1906, the daughter of Colonel St. John Louis Hyde du Plat Taylor and Alice Home-Purves¹⁵. Her father, a regular soldier, held a command there, and she spent her childhood at Purves in the Scottish Lowlands. After he was gassed in the First World War he could no longer winter in England, and the family moved to Newfoundland and then to Cyprus, where they built a house on the outskirts of Nicosia¹.

The saleroom and the handlist

Her training in the field came from Mortimer Wheeler and Tessa Wheeler, at Verulamium in 1931 and 1932 and at Maiden Castle in 1935 and 1936¹. Around 1930 she was a volunteer in the saleroom, where the Museum sold its duplicates under the drive led by Rupert Gunnis. A photograph of her at the counter later passed to R. S. Merrillees, and her short guide to Nicosia, written about 1933, advertised the sale room to visitors³. In 1932 she became Honorary Assistant Curator³.

In 1933 she published a water cistern at Salamis with Byzantine paintings in The Antiquaries Journal, and a note on Byzantine glazed ware in the Department of Antiquities' annual report^6,7. In 1938 she and V. Seton-Williams compiled a roneoed Classification of Pottery in the Cyprus Museum for the Department of Antiquities. It was the only handbook to the collection between 1899 and the 1947 Guide by Porphyrios Dikaios^10,11.

Ayios Philon, Apliki and Myrtou

Her obituarist lists rescue digs at Salamis, Paphos and Rizokarpaso and names Apliki and Ayios Philon as her main excavations before the war¹. At Ayios Philon, the ancient Carpasia, she dug three seasons for the Department of Antiquities, with the Cyprus Museum and the Ashmolean Museum sponsoring the work and dividing the finds; the third season was in the spring of 1937. Eve Dray, Judith Dobell and Kim Collingridge worked with her in the Karpas, the last two digging tombs at Aphendrika².

Apliki followed in 1938. Her discovery there of Late Bronze Age mining evidence was reported in the survey of Cypriot archaeology for 1939 to 1945¹², and her obituarist calls the site a Mycenaean mining settlement¹. She published it in The Antiquaries Journal in 1952²¹. In 2007 Kling and Muhly edited a volume on her excavations there, Joan Du Plat Taylor's Excavations at the Late Bronze Age Mining Settlement of Apliki Karamallos, Cyprus²².

During the war she worked in the Ministry of Information as a press censor dealing with the Greek press¹. In 1949 she tested the site of Myrtou-Pigadhes, and in 1950 she excavated it with Miss V. Seton-Williams for the Ashmolean and the University of Sydney. The finds were divided with the Cyprus Museum, which received a Mitannian-style cylinder seal¹⁴. The Ashmolean published the sanctuary in 1957 as Myrtou-Pigadhes: A Late Bronze Age Sanctuary in Cyprus, credited to her and others^8,13.

The library and the wrecks

In 1945 she became the first Librarian of the Institute of Archaeology in London, first at St John's Lodge in Regent's Park and then in Gordon Square. She was largely responsible for assembling the Institute's collection of archaeological books and for its system of classification^1,18. For about ten years before she retired in 1970 she held meetings in her room at the Institute for people interested in nautical archaeology, and from those meetings grew the Committee, later the Council, for Nautical Archaeology¹⁸.

The Council's first meeting was held in July 1964, and she was one of four women present¹⁹. She became its first vice-chairman and research secretary. Though not a swimmer or a diver, she spent many hours adapting surface excavation methods to underwater work and lectured on them across the country¹. In 1960 she represented the Institute of Archaeology, with George Bass for the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, on the excavation of the Bronze Age wreck at Cape Gelidonya¹⁷. She wrote the report's chapter on the condition and treatment of the finds¹⁶. She edited the World Underwater Federation's volume on marine archaeology and founded and edited the Council's International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, whose first volume appeared in 1972^1,20. The University of Pennsylvania gave her an honorary doctorate¹.

In her last years she directed two Iron Age sites in southern Italy for the British School at Rome and co-directed the excavation at Motya in Sicily¹. With A. H. S. Megaw she had just completed the Ayios Philon publication, whose first part had appeared in the Department of Antiquities' report for 1980^1,9. She died in Cambridge on 21 May 1983¹⁵.