Mortimer Wheeler

Mortimer Wheeler never dug in Cyprus, but two of the people who did had learned their fieldwork from him. Born on 10 September 1890, he and Tessa Verney Wheeler proposed the lines on which the Institute of Archaeology in London was founded in 1937⁶. Eve Stewart attended his lectures there and he asked her to draw metalwork; the Institute later received Cypriot finds from the excavations of the Stewarts and of Joan du Plat Taylor^6,7. Du Plat Taylor had taken part in the Wheelers' English excavations and carried their method to Cyprus⁶.

Vassos Karageorghis studied at University College London and trained on digs under Wheeler, including Verulamium; Catling suspected that Karageorghis's insistence on prompt publication came from Wheeler⁴. Karageorghis called him "my Master in field archaeology" and said that Wheeler suggested the Kition book^8,10. the series Wheeler edited, New Aspects of Antiquity published both Salamis in Cyprus and Kition^9,10. Porphyrios Dikaios thanked "Dr. R. E. M. Wheeler" in 1940 for valuable support with the Vounous publication¹¹.

In Karageorghis's memoir, as summarised by Rystedt, the Kourion Window Krater had been split between the Cyprus Museum and the British Museum and restored as two vases until "the solution arrived with Mortimer Wheeler": the fragments were assembled in Nicosia and the London parts were registered as on permanent loan in the British Museum inventory⁵. Under Wheeler's leadership, Kiely writes, the British Academy began regular public funding of the British schools and of the excavation at Myrtou-Pigadhes⁶. Wheeler died on 22 July 1976¹.