Richard W. V. Catling

Richard Catling saw the Kouklia tombs of the 1950s into print seven years after the death of the man who excavated them. When Hector Catling died on 15 February 2013, it fell to his son, as academic executor, to publish the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age cemeteries at Kouklia (Palaepaphos), which Hector had been entrusted with in 1958¹.

The text left in 2013 was incomplete, with no full analysis of the finds and their wider context. In the foreword, dated June 2020, Richard writes that he limited himself to making the catalogues consistent and removing incomplete or repetitive passages, and that he did not have the qualifications to add comparative references. He records that the finds were spread among six museums (Kouklia, Nicosia, St Andrews, Liverpool, Birmingham and Sydney), that the excavation records were scattered and in part recovered only in December 2009, and that a long dispute over publication rights had obstructed access¹. Joost Crouwel's preface confirms the posthumous publication and Richard's editing¹. Hector's notebooks and inventories, in his possession in 2013, have been deposited with the Liverpool World Museum¹.

The two volumes appeared in 2020 as Kouklia: Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Tombs at Palaepaphos 1951-1954, with chapters by H. Hughes-Brock, B. Buchanan and J. Y. MacDonald¹. In 2019 Richard had presented a Late Cypriot II Base Ring juglet, 15.6 cm high, to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; its credit line reads "Presented by Mr Richard Catling, 2019, from the bequest of Mr Hector Catling" (AN2019.1)².