Louise Steel

Steel holds a BA (Hons) from the University of Liverpool and a PhD from the University of London²⁰. Wikipedia gives 1988 for her Liverpool degree, in Archaeology of the East Mediterranean²¹. Her doctoral thesis, 'Burial Customs in Cyprus at the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age', was completed in 1993²². Kiely says this research was done with Nicholas Coldstream at UCL, and that she was later a post-doctoral student at Edinburgh¹.

The thesis fed her 1996 review of the tombs from Episkopi-Bamboula and Kaloriziki at Kourion, whose material she had studied in Philadelphia²². There she called LC III B "particularly elusive" and read its many single-phase burial grounds as a sign of an unsettled time of population movement and internal conflict before the Iron Age took shape in CG I²². She argued that in LC III B people held on to their wealth, whereas in CG I an elite again put large quantities of bronze and gold into tombs²².

Steel was second author, with Sturt W. Manning and others, of the 1994 preliminary report of the Tsaroukkas, Mycenaeans and Trade Project, and wrote its section on the history of research in the Maroni valley before 1990⁷. She also contributed to Manning and Monks's 1998 publication of the Late Cypriot tombs at Maroni-Tsaroukkas²³. At Kalavasos she worked as pottery specialist²⁰. Her 1994 paper published the Mycenaean chariot krater K-AD 1619, found in 1992 in tomb 13 at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios²⁴. With Alison South she wrote on the White Slip sequence (2001) and the Red Lustrous Wheelmade ware (2007) from Kalavasos²⁵.

With C. Mee she published in 1998 the Cypriot collections of the University of Liverpool and the Williamson Art Gallery in the Corpus of Cypriote Antiquities²⁶. She signed the survey 'Archaeology in Cyprus 1987-1997' in Archaeological Reports from the University of Edinburgh⁶. The British Academy supported her research with a postdoctoral fellowship and a small research grant¹⁹.

Her 1998 article in the Annual of the British School at Athens examined the context and function of Mycenaean pottery imported to Cyprus in Late Cypriot II²⁷.

In a 2001 chapter Steel argued that the British Museum's excavations of the 1890s were chiefly after material of Mycenaean date, and that this is why its Cypriot collection sits mainly in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities⁷. She identified the "sub-mycenaean" ware Henry Beauchamp Walters found at Kourion as Cypro-Geometric White Painted pottery, and dated the Salamis tumuli to the Iron Age⁷. She held that a krater Luigi Palma di Cesnola ascribed to Amathus more plausibly came from Maroni⁷. From the publication of John Myres's Cesnola handbook in 1914, she wrote, "the equation of Mycenaean pottery with a Mycenaean colonisation of the island became central to twentieth century discourse on the Late Cypriot period"⁷. The contributor to Maran and Stockhammer quotes that sentence, saying "I can do no better"²⁸.

The site, first found by the Sydney Cyprus Survey Project, is locally called Lithosouros, "mound of stones", and the team kept the survey's name for it^1,29. The sources differ on when work began: Steel writes that a Lampeter team had worked there since 2004; Kiely says the site has been explored since 2005, after a survey the year before^1,29. In 2006 a tomb used over several generations between the 16th and 14th centuries BCE was excavated; no skulls were found in it, and Steel suggests they had been removed in the Late Bronze Age³⁰.

The main occupation dates to LC IIC, the 13th century BC, after initial activity in MC III to LC I³¹. In the American Journal of Archaeology in 2016 she argued that the site was more complex than survey-based typologies suggest, "multifunctional" and with "an important economic role"³¹. She credited the Department of Antiquities, among them Pavlos Flourentzos, Despo Pilides and Eftychia Zachariou, and her UWTSD students³¹.

Steel has changed her reading of Building 1: in 2016 she took its size and massive construction to show a non-domestic, public or communal building³¹. In 2023 she wrote that it is "now more plausibly interpreted as a household"³². Her later papers treat a room excavated there between 2005 and 2008 and the site's "unusually high concentration" of gaming stones^32,33. Andreou wrote in 2016 that the materiality of Late Cypriot rural sites is represented only by Arediou Vouppes and Apliki Karamallos³⁴.

The sources give two page ranges for her 2008 BASOR article with C. McCartney on the survey: 9-37 in her 2016 bibliography, 1-29 in her 2008 chapter^29,31. Wikipedia says the project ran from 2004 to 2013 and worked with local authorities, the local school and oral history interviews²¹.

Fieldwork by the Gaza Research Project in 1999 and 2000 examined the context of Egyptian funerary cones at el-Moghraqa, which she published in 2004 with W. P. Manley, J. Clarke and M. Sadeq; she directed fieldwork there^20,35. She also worked on the Cypriot pottery from Deir el Balah and Tell Batash²⁰. Greener notes that she published in detail only 53 Cypriot vessels and sherds from Tel Batash, and says she was mistaken to add that its distribution pattern "is widely replicated throughout the Southern Levant"³⁶.

Wikipedia says she worked at Reading, held her British Academy fellowship at Edinburgh in 1995-1998, was acting director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem in 1998-2000, joined Lampeter in 2000 and became Professor in 2021-22²¹. In 2013 she was Senior Lecturer in Mediterranean Archaeology at UWTSD¹⁹.

Kiely calls her the author of "a key textbook on the prehistory of Cyprus", and judges that her 2011 study of materiality and consumption across the Eastern Mediterranean reflects a shift from single areas to interconnected regions¹. Her publications include Cyprus Before History¹⁹. Reviewing Materiality and Consumption in the Bronze Age Mediterranean, Mac Sweeney found it "accessible and engaging" and an approachable point of entry, but judged that neither its concepts nor its case studies are explored in great depth, that it reacts against the old orthodoxy rather than offering a coherent new approach in its own terms, and that its title does not fully match its contents³⁷. Her more recent research turns to the New Materialities, and she co-edited Earthy Matters with L. Attala²⁰.