Lawrence E. Stager

He was born Larry Elwood Stager on 5 January 1943 in Kenton, Ohio, to Francis Stager, a farmer, and the former Marcella Mae Wilson¹⁵. Recruited by the Harvard Club of Dayton, he became the first of his family to attend college¹⁵. The Harvard memorial minute says he thought Larry "too homey for Harvard" and called himself Lawrence, even Lawrence E., though he always preferred Larry¹⁴. He wrote his honours thesis under Roland de Vaux on burial practices in ancient Israel and graduated magna cum laude in 1965¹⁴. In the following year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem he met field archaeology and made his first discovery, an archaic Hebrew inscription he published in 1969¹⁴. Back at Harvard for his M.A. and Ph.D., he worked at Tell el-Hesi, the Wadi Buqe'ah and Idalion, and his dissertation on the Buqe'ah was completed under G. Ernest Wright and Frank Moore Cross in 1975¹⁴.

The sources disagree on when Stager's directing role began. Pamela Gaber writes that in 1969 Wright arranged for two of his graduate students, Stager and Anita Walker, to become co-directors at Idalion⁵. Wright's own account in the 1974 report says that Stager was made Field Director, with Anita Walker Furshpan given the same title, and the 1989 report says that the two became co-directors after Wright died in August 1974^1,2. The team arrived in 1971 for exploratory soundings and surveys⁵. Wright wrote that Stager helped him assemble the staff and that in the field Stager ran the West Acropolis work and "overall coordination and direction of the digging", with Wright as consultant¹.

At the close of the second season, in September 1972, the Department of Antiquities announced that a building of huge ashlar blocks set in gypsum plaster, then dated to the late 4th or early 3rd century BC, "may be" the "palace" mentioned by Einar Gjerstad¹⁶. Stager, Walker and Wright edited the first preliminary report in 1974¹. Stager wrote its chapters on the copper industry and the Hellenistic rebuilding of an ashlar structure on the West Terrace, on the Hellenistic wall of the West Acropolis, and the "Summary and Conjectures", and with Diane Lynn Saltz the account of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition¹. Of 150 kilograms of slag from Area 11/16, 130 came from one slag heap, and he suggested that the slag deposits began in the second half of the 4th century BC¹. He argued that the founding of Idalion should be raised by almost a century, to Late Cypriot IIB (about 1300 to 1230 BC), and wrote that in the first half of the 5th century the city minted its own coinage, "probably as an independent kingdom"¹.

The Turkish invasion of 1974 hit the project: the season could not be completed, and from August 1974 Turkish forces held the old Nicosia to Larnaca road in a salient just south of Idalion^2,17. From 1973 Stager taught at the University of Chicago, where within a decade he became full professor¹⁴. Walker supervised the 1973, 1975 and 1976 seasons, the two jointly supervised 1974 and 1977, and Gaber was acting field director in 1978².

Fieldwork resumed under Stager in 1980, mainly on the West Terrace, where a wall 10.50 metres thick surrounded the hill^2,18. Under the collapsed wall lay a hinged bronze helmet cheek-piece pierced by a sharp weapon, and the upper floors of one room held late Cypro-Classical sherds, five Phoenician ostraka and a Cypriot syllabic inscription¹⁸. That year he was also the expedition's photographer². Gaber writes that he named the monumental building "the Palace", concluded that it was founded around 475 and long used, and so refuted Gjerstad's date for the end of the city-kingdom⁵.

Stager and Walker published the report on the 1973 to 1980 work in 1989². They wrote that Gjerstad's view of the West Terrace as the palatial precinct had been "reinforced, if not completely confirmed", and that the Phoenician ostraca suggest the building was remodelled after Kition took Idalion between 450 and 425 BC². They rejected the idea that Idalion's layout was an "Oriental" plan imposed by a "persophile regime"². Gaber reports that Stager put the walled city's population at eight to ten thousand⁵.

The date of Idalion's fall is disputed⁵. Gjerstad put the end of the kingdom in 470 BC, while Stager and Walker placed the Kitian destruction about the middle of the 5th century^5,19. Christian Körner notes that Georgiadou (2010) leans back towards Gjerstad's date and that the evidence at Idalion does not yet clearly identify the siege¹⁹. Georgia Bonny Bazemore writes that the expedition "confirmed Gjerstad's suspicions" of a palace²⁰. Michael Given judged that the expedition made "a considerable contribution" to knowledge of Archaic and Classical Idalion, Neolithic settlement and ancient copper production²¹. Given also found its descriptions of the excavations and catalogues of finds marred by errors of reference and its sections apparently "written in total isolation"²¹. Maria Hadjicosti reports that the Department of Antiquities later found a Phoenician administrative centre just east of the monumental structures of the American expedition and the New Hampshire Expedition²².

In 1975 Stager added the field directorship at Carthage, and in his last Chicago year he began excavating at Ashkelon¹⁴. In 1986 he returned to Harvard as the first Dorot Professor of the Archaeology of Israel, became director of the Semitic Museum in 1987 and retired in 2012¹⁴. He died at his home in Concord, Massachusetts, on 29 December 2017, aged 74, of injuries from a fall^14,15,23. He left his wife, Susan Simmons, and two children, Jennifer Simmons Stager and David Stager¹⁴.