John Henry (Harry) Iliffe

John Henry Iliffe, known as Harry, heard of Archaic sculpture found at Kouklia while on a bicycle tour with Terence Bruce Mitford in August 1949. They obtained a licence, and Liverpool and St Andrews paid for the work^1,2. Iliffe was a Cambridge archaeology graduate who had worked in the Toronto museum, was appointed to the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem in 1936, and became director of the Liverpool Museums after leaving Palestine in 1948¹. He was a co-author of the 1930 Royal Ontario Museum catalogue of Greek vases, which published most of that museum's Cypriot pottery¹⁴.

The Kouklia Expedition ran from 1950 to 1955. A. H. S. Megaw first allowed soundings over a wide area and from 1951 a licence limited to set plots¹. Thomas Kiely gives the aims as the settlement and the sanctuary of Aphrodite, and adds the need to replace what Liverpool Museums had lost to wartime bombing, which he says explains the search for tombs³. The 1952 season opened the Evreti tombs, with rich Late Cypriot III burials reused later⁵. Work in 1954 uncovered a twin-towered city gate beside the Persian siege mound⁷. Iliffe and Mitford reported on the first season in the Antiquaries Journal in 1951¹⁰. The finds went to Liverpool and St Andrews, the latter collection later passing to the National Museums of Scotland³.

By 1958 his health was failing, and Mitford asked Hector William Catling to publish the tombs. Iliffe died in 1960¹⁹.