Paul Åström

Many of the museum and private collections of Cypriot antiquities now known to scholars were catalogued in volumes that came off one press, Paul Åströms Förlag. Its owner and editor was Paul Åström, a Swedish prehistorian who also wrote the standard typology of Middle Bronze Age Cyprus and excavated Hala Sultan Tekke for more than three decades^2,3.

Lund, Bathurst and the Middle Cypriote Bronze Age

Åström was born at Sundsvall on 15 January 1929². He studied at Lund under Einar Gjerstad, whose Cypriot publications he later listed in a bibliography for Archaeologia Cypria^1,27. Bietak records that he was a lecturer at Lund from 1957, that his dissertation won the university's prize for the best of 1958, and that he became associate chair there and director of the Antiquities Museum².

In 1955 he travelled to Mount Pleasant, near Bathurst in New South Wales, to work with J. R. B. Stewart on his dissertation on the Middle Cypriote Bronze Age. A Sydney student, Robert Merrillees, met him there, and the two corresponded from 1956 until Åström's death¹. Lorna Powell, drawing on Stewart's papers, writes that Stewart invited him to collaborate and that the two never agreed on a joint excavation: Åström favoured a stratified settlement, Stewart tombs, and Kalopsidha and Hala Sultan Tekke were both mentioned as possible sites⁴. Eve Stewart edited the English of his papers, and he later published her husband's Corpus of Cypriot Artefacts of the Early Bronze Age and the Ayia Paraskevi and Vasilia volume of 1988⁴. The Middle Cypriote Bronze Age appeared at Lund in 1957².

Posts abroad and fieldwork

From 1958 to 1963 he directed the Swedish Institute at Athens, holding the post of cultural attaché at the Swedish Embassy². In 1959 he made trial excavations at Kalopsidha and Ayios Iakovos, published in 1966 as Excavations at Kalopsidha and Ayios Iakovos in Cyprus^2,21. He was visiting professor at the University of Missouri in 1963-64, where a departmental evaluation by Weinberg praised his care for students³. He directed the Swedish Institute in Rome from 1967 to 1969, then held the chair of ancient culture and social life at Gothenburg from 1969 until he became emeritus in 1993, serving as dean of humanities from 1975 to 1980².

Hala Sultan Tekke, near Larnaca, occupied him from 1971. Bietak says he dug there until shortly before his death, and Karin Nys gives the years as 1971 to 2005^2,3. The results were published as volumes 1 to 12 of Hala Sultan Tekke in the SIMA series^3,24. Annie Caubet, in her tribute, praised the interdisciplinary method of the excavation and noted that he did not live to write its synthesis¹. In 1980 he found the building complex that teams from Giessen and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel now re-excavate¹⁴. He also worked at Dendra, San Giovenale and Midea².

The press and the collections

Bietak counts 135 SIMA monographs and 175 pocket-books from Paul Åströms Förlag, in which his wife Elisabeth worked². For museums and collectors the important series was the Corpus of Cypriote Antiquities, SIMA 20. The series list printed in the back matter of one of its volumes gives catalogues of the Cypriot holdings at Stanford, Missouri, Karlsruhe, Wolverhampton, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, the Ashmolean, the Abbey Museum in Queensland, the Kelsey Museum and Laon, among others⁷. Åström co-authored the Missouri volume with J. C. Biers and others in 1979^8,26. In 2003 he and Merrillees published the Cypriot antiquities of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne²⁵.

His press also issued the catalogue of the Zintilis collection in the same year, written by Stella Lubsen-Admiraal^1,5. Samuel Hardy calls the collection's find-spot data only "relatively reliable" for the most part; Åström is named in that article only as the publisher, and the comment concerns the catalogue's find-spot data¹³. In 1973 Vassos Karageorghis wrote that Åström supplied information for the catalogue of the Pierides collection at Larnaca¹¹.

In 1971 he published Who's Who in Cypriote Archaeology as SIMA 23. It gives biographical notes and complete bibliographies of the Cypriot archaeologists, from prehistoric to Byzantine, who were alive in 1970^6,22. In 1994 he edited The Fantastic Years on Cyprus, a volume on the Swedish Cyprus Expedition and its members²⁸.

Chronology and honours

In August 1987 he convened the colloquium "High, Middle or Low?" on absolute chronology at Gothenburg, followed by a second at Schloss Haindorf in 1990; Bietak calls it the initiator of SCIEM 2000². His honours included the Order of the Polar Star in 1973, honorary doctorates from Vienna (1994), Athens (1995) and Ioannina (2001), and correspondent status at the Institut de France in 1998. In 2005 he received the Order of Merit of Cyprus^1,2. Bietak lists 687 publications².

In September 2007 he met colleagues in Stockholm for the eightieth anniversary of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition and compiled, with Merrillees's help, a concordance of the illustrations in Gjerstad's Studies on Prehistoric Cyprus¹. On 3 October 2008 he dictated to his wife "Cypriot Archaeology: A Prospering Story", for the closing lecture of the Brussels conference on Cypriot archaeology³. He died on 4 October 2008^1,2.