John Franklin Daniel

John Franklin Daniel dug the city of Kourion for the University Museum, Philadelphia, from 1934, as assistant to George H. McFadden, who worked mainly at the sanctuary of Apollo. Costello describes the expedition as technically under Bert Hodge Hill, with McFadden as chief excavator⁵. On the city site Daniel found the theatre, the main basilica, the House of Achilles and the House of Eustolios, which he first called "The Palace"; his Trench III of 1934 produced the first victims of the Earthquake House⁵. He also copied inscriptions from the Baths and the Annex of Eustolios, and Terence Mitford edited them in The Inscriptions of Kourion from Daniel's Field Books, a volume dedicated to his memory⁴.

In spring 1937 he turned to Bamboula, where ten trial trenches led to the circuit wall and two groups of houses of Late Cypriot II and III date⁶. His provisional report of 1938 set out the stratified Late Cypriot III sequence and used sub-Mycenaean pottery to argue for the date of the Greek foundation of Kourion⁶. He had already published two Late Cypriot III tombs from Kaloriziki in 1937¹⁰. Robertson calls him "the brightest American student" of Cypriote archaeology and mentions his 1939 review of Casson's Ancient Cyprus¹⁴.

Daniel died in 1948 on a reconnaissance trip in Turkey, just after a final campaign at Bamboula whose material had not been analysed; the villagers of Episkopi allowed his burial in the churchyard there^1,2. McFadden, writing in 1954, places his death early in 1949⁷. Jack L. Benson published his finds as Bamboula at Kourion in 1972 and the Kaloriziki necropolis in 1973, and the finds were divided between Curium House, the Cyprus Museum and the University Museum².