John Lawrence Angel

J. Lawrence Angel wrote the skeletal reports for three Cypriot excavations: Khirokitia, Sotira and the Bamboula cemetery at Kourion. He was born in England on 21 March 1915 to a sculptor father and an American classicist mother, took his AB and PhD at Harvard (1936, 1942), taught at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia from 1943 to 1962, and then became curator of the Division of Physical Anthropology at the US National Museum of Natural History⁸. His obituary lists eleven field trips to the Near East between 1937 and 1978, concentrating on Greece, Cyprus and Turkey, without saying which went to Cyprus⁸.

In March and early May 1949 he studied the remains of 61 people from Late Bronze Age tombs 2 to 21 at Bamboula, excavated by John Franklin Daniel, and Hellenistic skeletons from Ayios Ermoyenis dug by George H. McFadden⁶. He later studied the 20 individuals from Jack L. Benson's Tomb 40 of 1956, and his full report appeared as Appendix B of Bamboula at Kourion in 1972, pages 148 to 165³. Porphyrios Dikaios thanked him for the study of the Khirokitia human remains, published in 1953 as Appendix II^1,4. The series comprised 34 infants, 11 children, 39 male and 37 female adults and two of unknown sex, kept in the Cyprus Museum⁴. Eight skulls from Sotira were reassembled in his laboratory at Jefferson in 1955-56, after the University Museum arranged their shipment with Dikaios's consent, and he reported on them in Dikaios's Sotira of 1961^2,5.

Angel wrote that Bert Hodge Hill, Daniel and McFadden had aroused his interest in Cypriot skeletal material⁵. He died on 3 November 1986⁸.