Paul Åström

He was born at Sundsvall on 15 January 1929, the son of the engineer Fredrik Åström and his wife Martha, and grew up in Malmö^2,45,57. Paavo Roos writes that he took his degrees at Lund quickly while working as an amanuensis, a correspondence-school teacher and a reviewer for Kvällsposten and other papers⁵⁷. He hesitated between archaeology and literary studies, and after choosing archaeology he kept his interest in literature⁵⁷.

In the late 1940s he took part in excavations on Bornholm and Gotland, and in 1950 at Labranda in Turkey². There, at the excavation of the Uppsala professor A. W. Persson, he spent his lunch breaks exploring the rock-cut sarcophagi and chamber tombs around the sanctuary, Roos says, so as to have something of his own to work on⁵⁷. His professor at Lund, Einar Gjerstad, had long been busy publishing the Swedish Cyprus Expedition of 1927-31; according to Roos he told the young man to "take the Bronze Age of Cyprus instead, it goes faster", and Åström accepted^45,57. He first visited Cyprus in 1953, with Gjerstad and other Swedish graduate students, and Karageorghis met him then^45,57.

Judy Powell, in her book on James R. Stewart and Eve Stewart, writes that Åström met the couple in Stockholm, aged twenty-six and full of enthusiasm for Cypriot archaeology⁴. He had taken responsibility for the Middle Cypriot section of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, Stewart was to publish the earlier period, and Stewart invited him to Mount Pleasant, his house just outside Bathurst in New South Wales, so that they could work closely together^1,4,50. Eve Stewart remembered him as "Professor Gjerstad's best student", who was to write the Middle Bronze Age part of Swedish Cyprus Expedition IV as his doctoral thesis, and he sailed to Australia with the Stewarts along with another Swede, Laila Haglund^4,50.

He stayed six months at Mount Pleasant, reading all day in Stewart's library and discussing the Bronze Age with him in the evenings⁵⁰. Robert Merrillees, who met him there, describes a mock Scottish baronial mansion surrounded by sheep, poultry and numerous cats, and Powell calls the tall, urbane young Swede a fish out of water in that world^1,4. The sources disagree on the year of the stay, 1955 or 1956^1,4. Merrillees writes that they first met in 1955 at Mount Pleasant, where Åström was staying with Stewart to research his dissertation; Powell has the Stewarts return to Australia in the middle of 1956, on what she calls Paul's first visit to the house^1,4. Not long after Merrillees began at Sydney University in 1956, the two started a correspondence that ran without interruption until Åström's death¹.

Stewart had promised to help him complete the dissertation⁴. Powell also records that Stewart wrote to Olof Vessberg that Åström's knowledge of general Near Eastern archaeology was poor, and then criticised Vessberg to Åström⁴. The two men hoped to excavate together but never agreed on the details: Åström wanted test digs and careful stratigraphic work at a settlement, Stewart preferred tombs and disputed Åström's costings, and Kalopsidha and Hala Sultan Tekke were both possible sites⁴. Eve Stewart edited his papers, checking sources and improving their English, and later those of Lena Söderhjelm⁴.

The sources disagree on the year of his doctorate, 1957 or 1958^45,57. Roos, at his first Latin lecture at Lund in September 1957, was told that the department's flag was flying for a disputation that day; the candidate was Åström, and the thesis was The Middle Cypriote Bronze Age⁵⁷. Karageorghis, who visited him at Lund in 1957 after taking his own London doctorate, writes that Åström "received his in 1958"⁴⁵. Åström himself recalled writing the thesis in 1957, "still before the computer"⁴⁴. He was 28 at the defence, and the dissertation gave him a docentship in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History⁵⁷. Bietak says it won the university's prize for the best dissertation, and in 1972 it was taken into the Swedish Cyprus Expedition series as volume IV:1B^2,45. Louise Maguire later found the most obvious problem with his typology to be its lack of correlation with the one Gjerstad had devised, the same vessels having been classified under different ware categories⁵⁸.

In January 1958, at twenty-nine, he took over the Swedish Institute at Athens, after what a 1974 history of the Institute called "a very rapid career"⁴⁶. Bietak says the directorship, which he held until 1963, went with the diplomatic post of Cultural Attaché at the Swedish Embassy². He made major efforts to build up the Institute's library and edited its publication series, and Roos says his years in Athens meant a great deal of teaching and also led to large excavations in Greece and Cyprus^46,57. In Greece his name stayed with the Mycenaean cuirass found in a chamber tomb at Dendra, which he explored with Nicolaos Verdelis in 1960-63: a complete bronze corslet, in Roos's words, of a type described by Homer^43,57. In 1959 he was also working on the Late Bronze Age volumes of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, IV:1C and 1D, which he had taken over from Arne Furumark and which appeared in 1972^45,59.

In late summer 1959 he excavated in Cyprus for the first time, as he told it in 1974^15,47. King Gustaf VI Adolf, who had himself taken part in the last phase of the Swedish excavations on the island, personally paid the costs of this small expedition, which ran under the auspices of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition^21,47. He meant to dig a few trenches in Bronze Age settlements and read from their stratigraphy how the pottery changed from the Middle to the Late Bronze Age⁴⁷.

In his account, the small village of Kalopsidha, where murders had been part of daily life and violent fighting had raged during the troubles on the island, received them a little distrustfully, wondering whether they were English⁴⁷. One landowner let them dig after a written assurance that they would fill in their holes, and for two plots that belonged to the Church they went to Archbishop Makarios himself, who gave his consent⁴⁷. The mayor gave them free lodging in the village school, and with four workmen they dug nine trenches^21,47. Sherds from one ash layer dated a destruction to about 1600 BC, shortly before the end of the Middle Bronze Age, and in the ninth trench they found what they had been looking for, a settlement running from the Middle into the Late Bronze Age⁴⁷.

He later wrote that the Kalopsidha material was where he first used the help of the natural sciences: eight specialists, on plant remains, residues, fingerprints, human and animal bones, charcoal, pollen, molluscs and stone, contributed to the final publication⁴⁴. For his work on finger- and palm-prints he teamed up with two Swedish police officers, Sven A. Eriksson and Karl-Erik Sjöquist⁴³. The finds were divided at the Cyprus Museum, which kept a fraction; the Swedish Orient Line carried the Swedish share free of charge to Athens for study and then to the Museum of Classical Antiquities (Antikmuseet) at Lund^21,47. Elias Markou drew almost all the pots illustrated, and Åström's parents helped clean, mend or mark the sherds²¹. Publication was delayed for lack of funds, and the book came out in 1966 thanks to the subscribers to Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology^21,57.

In 1959 he also bought a glass jug said to have been found in a tomb at Xyliatos, southwest of Nicosia, and in 1960 he gave the Cyprus Museum a Hellenistic amphora of Glazed Painted Ware that had formerly been in a private collection^16,48.

Roos writes that in the 1960s Åström built up a wide network of scholars, and that when some of their work found no room in the Swedish series he founded his own press in 1962, while also distributing the series of the Athens and Rome institutes⁵⁷. Its lines were Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology (SIMA), a pocket-book series beside it and the Journal of Prehistoric Religion, and he initiated the Corpus of Cypriote Antiquities, his series on the Cypriot collections of various museums^2,45. Karin Nys writes that he offered many young scholars a place for their master's or doctoral work, as an article in the journal, in the pocket-books or as a volume of the red SIMA series, and Karageorghis that SIMA carried dissertations from many countries which could otherwise never have been published^43,45.

Annie Caubet allowed that some no doubt reproached him for the uneven quality of the contents and the lack of synthesis in some volumes; in her view the point was the chance given to everyone, without preconceptions or sectarianism, to publish their contribution to Cypriot studies quickly¹. She pictured him at every meeting and congress on Cypriot history and archaeology, carrying heavy loads of his latest publications¹.

Åström published Merrillees's thesis on the Cypriote Bronze Age pottery found in Egypt, and their co-operation culminated in 2003 in a joint catalogue of the Cypriote pottery in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, which Åström brought out in SIMA without any subsidy when the Gallery did not fulfil its commitment to publish its Old World antiquities¹.

When the Sydney Chair of Near Eastern Archaeology was advertised in the middle of 1962, Åström applied, naming Eve Stewart as a referee⁴. He offered to publish Stewart's corpus, suggesting at first that xerox copies might be enough, which neither Eve Stewart nor Basil Hennessy thought acceptable; in 1988 he published the first volume of the corpus and the excavations at Ayia Paraskevi and Vasilia⁴.

The archaeologist Elisabeth Åström worked with him at the press, which his family carried on after his death².

At the University of Missouri, where he was visiting associate professor in 1963-64, Saul S. Weinberg's evaluation found the students' report on his courses "unanimously favourable"⁴³. As Director of the Swedish Institute in Rome from 1967 to 1969 he excavated the Etruscan settlement at San Giovenale⁴³.

In 1969 he was appointed professor of Ancient Culture and Society at Gothenburg, which became his base for the rest of his life⁵⁷. He held the chair until he retired as emeritus in 1993, and was Dean of the Faculty of Humanities from 1975 to 1980². To make room for the press he acquired Jonsered manor when he moved to Gothenburg, and Roos notes that the University has since taken it over; Powell puts it that in retirement he did what Stewart had failed to do with Mount Pleasant^4,57.

At Gothenburg he taught mainly the Middle and Late Bronze Ages of Cyprus and supervised the doctoral dissertations of young scholars of various nationalities, several Cypriots and Greeks among them⁴⁵. Roos adds that other scholars with Cypriot material also chose to present their theses at Gothenburg, since Cyprus had no university of its own before 1989⁵⁷. Nys met him as a master's student on 17 May 1993, at the Cypriote Stone Sculptures conference in Belgium; when she and a fellow student asked to join a dig in Cyprus he answered that students who attended a full congress were very welcome at his excavation, and her work with him at Hala Sultan Tekke began there⁴³.

In June 1971 he made soundings at Hala Sultan Tekke to survey the site west of the mosque, where the Late Bronze Age town lies at shallow depth in fields near the Larnaca Salt Lake¹⁷. Those first trial trenches, he wrote, established a stretch of the town wall with a gate in the south, located tombs, wells and house walls, and were joined by test borings in the salt lake⁴⁷. When he brought the 1971 finds to the Cyprus Museum, he recalled, the curator, Kyriakos Nicolaou, asked what to call the expedition, and they agreed on "the Swedish Cyprus Expedition number two"⁴⁹. A tribute to Gjerstad in Cyprus Today spoke in the same terms of a second Swedish Cyprus Expedition under Gjerstad's disciple, and Åström himself wrote that at Kalopsidha, Ayios Iakovos and Hala Sultan Tekke he had tried to follow in the footsteps of Gjerstad and the first expedition^49,53.

The Swedish mission's tenth season, in 1980, was again under his direction⁵². Matthias Recke wrote in 2012 that work by Giessen at the site served the final publication of a building complex Åström had discovered in 1980 and in part exposed over a large area⁵⁴. Caubet saw the same openness he showed as a publisher in the very interdisciplinary conduct of the excavation, and Roos notes that his excavations, which included marine archaeology, made early use of ground-penetrating radar and electromagnetic instruments^1,57.

The sources give different end dates for his work there^2,43,55,56. Nys gives his excavation of the harbour town as 1971-2005, and the excavation report for 2005 records work on the porticoed building at Dromolaxia, west of Hala Sultan Tekke, directed by Åström with Nys assisting^43,51. Feldbacher and colleagues write that he excavated in the city intermittently from the 1970s until 2004, Benoît Devillers and colleagues that he led the expedition between 1971 and 2008, and Bietak that he worked on the site until shortly before his death^2,55,56. Roos, writing in 2009, said that both the digging and the publication were still going on⁵⁷. By Karageorghis's count he and his students had published nine fascicules on the excavation; he planned one or more synthesis volumes but did not live to write them⁴⁵. In Greece he also led the excavation of the Mycenaean citadel at Midea from 1983 to 1997 with Katie Demakopoulou⁴³.

He organised several international conferences on Cypriot archaeology and published their proceedings very promptly⁴⁵. Bietak credits the colloquium "High, Middle or Low?" on absolute chronology, held at Gothenburg on 20-22 August 1987, with starting the joint work on a Middle and Late Bronze Age chronology that led, through a second symposium in 1990, to the SCIEM 2000 programme². In September 2007 a meeting in Stockholm marked the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition; Merrillees writes that it let him carry out a concordance of the illustrations in Gjerstad's Studies on Prehistoric Cyprus, and the proceedings, with the concordance, appeared shortly before his death¹.

He received honorary doctorates from Vienna in 1994, Athens in 1995 and Ioannina in 2001². In 1998 the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres named him a Correspondant étranger; Merrillees writes that he and Karageorghis were the only two foreign specialists in Cypriote prehistory to be admitted¹. The sources disagree on the grade and year of his Cypriot honour^2,45. Bietak lists him as Grand Commander of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Cyprus in 2005, while Karageorghis writes that in 2007 he received from the President of the Republic the insignia of Commander of the Order of Merit for his contribution to Cypriote archaeology^2,45.

In his last years he tried hard to raise funds to endow a chair of Cypriote Archaeology in Stockholm, without success⁴⁵. On 3 October 2008, one day before he died, he dictated letters to several close friends; the one to Karageorghis thanked him for their long collaboration and friendship and asked for his help in getting funds for that chair⁴⁵. He had accepted an invitation to give the closing lecture of the POCA 2008 conference, and on his last day he dictated the text he wanted read there; it is dated 3 October 2008 and ends by insisting on documentation first and interpretation afterwards^43,44. He died after a short illness on 4 October 2008, at the age of 79^2,45,57.