Olof Vessberg

In 1945 Olof Vessberg succeeded Alfred Westholm as head of the Stockholm collections of finds from the Swedish Cyprus Expedition^1,2. Kristian Göransson gives him the post of Keeper from 1945 to 1953 and then the directorship of the new Medelhavsmuseet from 1955 to 1970; C.-G. Styrenius writes that he stayed, except for a couple of years, until 1970, as director of the whole museum for sixteen years^1,2. The collections, the Swedish share of the expedition's finds, were kept in the basement of the Historiska museet before the Medelhavsmuseet was created in 1954¹.

From 29 November 1946 James Stewart sent him ten parcels of records from his excavations at Vounous, and Vessberg confirmed that they had arrived. Stewart later gave his field records to the expedition, which put them in the museum's archive¹. Powell reports that Stewart wrote critically of Vessberg to Paul Åström in 1946 and again in 1957, and summarises the later note as saying that Vessberg knew nothing of Near Eastern archaeology³.

Vessberg published "Hellenistic and Roman Lamps in Cyprus" in Opuscula Atheniensia 1 (1953)⁷. In 1956 he and Westholm brought out The Swedish Cyprus Expedition IV:3, The Hellenistic and Roman Periods in Cyprus, in which Vessberg wrote the sections on lamps and glass^4,6. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East calls his study of Cypriot glass in it monumental, though dated⁵.