Robin C. M. Piercy

Robin C. M. Piercy was assistant director of the Kyrenia ship excavation from 1970 to 1975, and in the last of those years he helped finish the reassembly of the hull inside Kyrenia Castle^1,2.

In summer 1971 he and the project conservator, Francis Talbot Vassiliadou, began the year-long conservation of the hull timbers in polyethylene glycol (PEG 4000)². J. Richard Steffy moved to Cyprus in 1972, and in September of that year he and Piercy laid the first keel fragment of the reassembled ship². Michael Katzev's own account places the start of reassembly in October 1972, with the keel².

After the Turkish intervention of July 1974, Piercy and the Katzevs returned to their homes in the north. The Katzevs soon left for the United States; Piercy stayed at least another year and later moved to Turkey². Steffy and Piercy finished the reconstruction in May 1975, with the US Embassy and the United Nations allowing the work to be completed^2,4. Piercy was hired by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology in 1975 and by 1983 had been on its staff for eight years; he had directed the Mombasa Wreck Excavation since 1976^1,2. Steffy credited him with the photographs of the hull timbers in his 1985 interim report⁵. After 2003 Piercy and Helena Wylde Swiny visited the Kyrenia collection and found it little changed in thirty years³.