M. R. James

When the Cyprus Exploration Fund sent its first team to the island in 1887-88, the Cambridge place that H. B. Smith could not take went to M. R. James, Fellow of King's College¹. His forenames are not given in the expedition's report. The expedition worked as students of the British School at Athens under Ernest A. Gardner, with D. G. Hogarth and, later, the architect R. Elsey Smith, and James is a co-author of the report in the Journal of Hellenic Studies¹.

To learn Cypriot methods the team first dug Leontari Vouno, about four miles south of Nicosia, and the site was entrusted to James. He wrote that part of the report, describing massive masonry which the team called Crusader, mounds and cairns with Bronze Age pottery, cisterns, house foundations and an unfinished principal shaft¹. He then worked at Kouklia, the site of Old Paphos, until he was compelled to leave for England on 2 April 1888¹. Myres and Ohnefalsch-Richter's catalogue of the Cyprus Museum indexes him at Leondari Vouno and at Paphos⁴, and Hogarth recorded visiting the church at Aschelia with him and Elsey Smith⁵. The season's finds were divided with the government's representative and shipped to the British Museum, the Ashmolean and the Fitzwilliam¹.

Salomon Reinach objected in 1888 that "a Mr. James from Cambridge" was both the government's representative and Cambridge's, a note reprinted in The Owl⁸.