Neville Agnew

In November 1989 a lightweight shelter went up over two mosaics at Nea Paphos, built "under the direction of Neville Agnew and Richard Coffman" of the Getty Conservation Institute¹. It was the hexashelter, which the volume's acknowledgments say Agnew developed and which was made in kit form by Jim Davies at the Institute's workshop¹. It replaced the temporary shelter the Department of Antiquities had built over the reinstalled Orpheus mosaic, which was removed for good¹.

Agnew and Richard Coffman describe it as a prototype: an aluminium tube frame with a fabric roof and side panels, in two hexagonal rings over the Orpheus and the Hercules and Amazon mosaics¹. They erected it with a five-man Department crew in about three weeks, and impermeable roof membranes were added in 1990¹.

With Po-Ming Lin he wrote the chapter on monitoring temperature and humidity in several Paphos shelters, begun in September 1988. Annual visits were too few to keep the instruments calibrated, so Department staff took spot readings between August 1989 and May 1990. The authors concluded that shelters with side panels protect adequately even when open¹. Both chapters appeared in the Institute's 1991 volume on the conservation of the Orpheus mosaic, which also credits him with photographs¹.