Samuel Andrew Hardy

Samuel Andrew Hardy wrote the study that used the published catalogues of Cypriot collections to ask who looted antiquities during the intercommunal conflict of 1963 to 1974. His doctoral work at the University of Sussex was funded by the ESRC, and the thesis, "Interrogating archaeological ethics in conflict zones: Cultural heritage work in Cyprus", is dated 2011 in his own references (another bibliography dates it 2010)^1,5. Summerer (2023) describes it as discussing the legal and ethical questions around the University of Ankara excavations at Salamis and the Galinoporni-Vasili hoard⁴.

In 2014 he published "Using Open-Source Data to Identify Participation in the Illicit Antiquities Trade" in the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research. It analyses four catalogues: two of the Louvre's Cypriot collection (1981 and 1992) and two of private collections formed during the conflict, the Pierides Foundation's and Severis's. Vassos Karageorghis was an author of all four, and Hardy takes the term "silent accord" from the Severis catalogue of 1999¹. By his count, of 16 conflict-period antiquities with find-spots in the Pierides catalogue of 1973, 10 were probably looted by Turkish Cypriots and 6 by Greek Cypriots; of 288 objects in the Severis catalogue, 77 had find-spots and 211 had none¹. He concludes that Greek Cypriots pillaged as well as Turkish Cypriots, and that Greek Cypriot archaeologists published interpretations that diverged from their own data¹.

He also examined the catalogue of the collection of Thanos Zintilis by Stella Lubsen-Admiraal (2003), noting that none of its objects came from regular excavations¹. Summerer reports that, despite the praise his dissertation received, he met obstacles in his career because of his criticism of nationalist archaeological communities⁴.