John Arthur Ruskin Munro

John Arthur Ruskin Munro wrote the tomb and find sections of the Cyprus Exploration Fund's reports on Polis tes Chrysochou and Salamis, as a student of the British School at Athens. Born in London on 24 February 1864, he was the son of the sculptor Alexander Munro and was educated at Charterhouse^14,15. Tatton-Brown describes him as a student at the British School at Athens who later became Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, and who directed excavations for the Fund¹⁰.

Taking over the Fund's dig at Polis

By Munro's own account, the second season of the Fund was "a legacy of the first". David George Hogarth had concluded an agreement with J. W. Williamson, who had been the most active member of the English syndicate that dug part of the Polis necropolis in 1886 and 1887. When the Government banned all digging except by public and scientific bodies, Williamson was left with rights he could not use, and he transferred them to the Fund's committee in return for a percentage of the value of the finds¹. None of the previous year's excavators were available. The committee asked Ernest A. Gardner, Director of the School, to start the work and to leave it in the charge of H. A. Tubbs and Munro, "as students of the British School"¹.

Gardner and Munro left Piraeus on 1 February 1889 and reached Larnaca on 6 February. The Commissioner of Paphos fixed boundaries on 13 February and digging began the next day in Williamson's vineyard. Gardner left on 25 February¹. Munro says the town site on the Poli Chiflik was left alone while Williamson's negotiation with the sixteen absentee owners still hung fire¹. In February Munro wrote of the finds as "rubbish" in a letter to A. S. Murray of the British Museum, and he later called Polis the "best tomb site at present known in Cyprus"⁷. At most thirty men and twenty-four women were at work¹. Munro counted 105 productive tombs; J. S. Smith gives over 200 tombs, 165 of them with recorded objects, and Ulbrich and Kiely give 154^1,7,9. Smith notes that Munro plotted tombs on a town plan and recorded skeletons and reburials, and that he paid more attention to context than Max Ohnefalsch-Richter had⁷.

On 14 April the Commissioner came to divide the finds with the Fund, and "the division was speedily and amicably effected". Munro handed the narrative to Tubbs on 15 April, the day the party left for Limniti¹. In the published report Munro wrote the preliminary narrative, the account of the tombs and the contents of the tombs, and Tubbs wrote the inscriptions and the Limniti section¹.

Salamis and a second season at Polis

Munro and Tubbs reached Larnaca on 8 January 1890, and the first sod was cut at Salamis on 16 January³. Munro signed the Salamis report at Oxford in February 1891. Tubbs wrote the excavations and inscriptions sections and Munro the finds, and the editor notes that Tubbs, who had left for a post in Australia, did not see his part through the press³. Warwick Wroth supplied the note on the coins³. Kiely, drawing on Munro's staffing table, reports that the workforce between 16 January and 4 June ranged from 26 to 117 men and 23 to 70 women, and that trial trenches across the whole urban site produced a large sample⁸.

In February 1890 Munro wrote anxiously to Murray that Polis could not be finished without more money, and the British Museum Trustees granted £70 to continue it⁸. The bull's-head capital from Salamis was allocated to the Fund in the 1890 division. In June Munro told Murray that the Fund could not afford to move it to the coast and feared "prowling villagers", so he asked the committee to allocate it to the British Museum, which could ask the Admiralty for a naval vessel. His earlier request to the Admiral of the Mediterranean Fleet had been "politely but firmly rebuffed". Commander George King-Hall shipped it in early 1891, after Munro and Tubbs had left Cyprus⁸.

With Tubbs called home, Munro worked alone at Polis from near the end of June 1890. Munro had written to Williamson from England asking him to negotiate a contract; Williamson secured it, and Cecil Smith "was most active in procuring the funds"². A site in the eastern necropolis gave 56 tombs in three weeks. He then bought a field in the western necropolis and paid by the number of shafts sunk, and 24 tombs there included one with two very fine Attic lecythi. The season totalled 80 tombs².

The dispute with Ohnefalsch-Richter

Munro's 1890 report called the argument for an older Marion on the east ridge, made by Herrmann and supported by Ohnefalsch-Richter's information, "ingenious" but "based on untrustworthy information and erroneous preconceptions"¹. John Linton Myres later recorded that Munro and Gardner held that geometric and other Cypriote pottery found with glass and Hellenistic or Roman bronzes was of the same age as those objects, and he thought this underestimated reburials⁵. Ohnefalsch-Richter replied in 1893 that he had done more in one campaign than Munro and Tubbs in two, that they "were seeing a grave opened for the first time", and that Munro "in 1890 wishes to instruct me" but "in 1891 recants his errors"⁶. Kiely adds that Ohnefalsch-Richter's work at Tamassos for Berlin in 1889 and his Polis sales of 1886 made him a rival of the Fund⁸.

After Cyprus

Munro gave the Ashmolean Museum a Hellenistic limestone head from Salamis in 1903 (AN1896-1908.C.604), and in 1930 a Cypriot bronze arrowhead (AN1930.391) and a fragment of a colossal terracotta votary's beard (AN1930.392), the last described by the museum as from his excavations for the Cyprus Exploration Fund at Salamis in 1890^11,12,13. His letters to Murray from the three seasons are in the British Museum¹⁰. He died in Oxford on 18 February 1944¹⁴.