N. P. Stanley Price

N. P. Stanley Price, then of Oxford University, sank a trial trench at Khirokitia in 1972 for the Department of Antiquities, taking radiocarbon samples and bone, shell and plant remains. The trench was 2 x 2 m: topsoil with combed and Red Lustrous ware lay over a layer of pisé, and below it an aceramic deposit inside a tholos^12,13. He published it with D. Christou in the Department's Report for 1973¹⁰. His survey of Neolithic sites that year also found again the general location of Dhali-Agridhi, which was Dikaios's site, and reported it to the American Expedition to Idalion; the land was Waqf property and could not be dug¹⁶. In August and September 1976 he and Alain Le Brun directed the preliminary campaign of a joint mission of the CNRS and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem at Khirokitia, with surface collection, geophysical survey and test trenches^14,15. His gazetteer Early Prehistoric Settlement in Cyprus appeared in 1979⁷.

From 1988 to 1991 he was project coordinator for the Getty Conservation Institute's Orpheus mosaic project at Paphos. With Paolo Mora, conservators and Demetrios Michaelides he planned the lifting of the Orpheus mosaic in August 1988; the lifting ran in two phases, in autumn 1988 and in May and June 1989, and he edited the 1991 report and wrote its preface⁹.

He later turned to the history of antiquities administration in Cyprus. His 2001 paper on the Ottoman Law of 1874 gives 15 June 1882 as the date the Cyprus Museum was formally founded, and weighs Max Ohnefalsch-Richter's claim to its origin against that of Herbert Kitchener². It describes the 1878 trial of Alessandro Palma di Cesnola as a strict application of that law², a case he took up again in the Antiquaries Journal in 2018³. Later studies cover Claude Delaval Cobham, Theophilus Mogabgab, Rupert Gunnis and the dismissal of John Hilton, the last two published in 2025^4,6.