Dr David Saunders

A seminar about recent metallurgical analysis of the ancient daggers from Vounous on Cyprus, held in UNE’s Museum of Antiquities, will be held this Friday, 14 July at noon in the Natural Resources small lecture theatre EM2.

The seminar will be delivered by Arts Building Lecture Theatre 3 , Dr David Saunders, honorary researcher at the Australian Institute of Archaeology (AIA) and is titled ‘Ancient Cypriot Metallurgy: Studies of Composition and Residual Stress’.

The daggers were excavated and once formed part of the private collection of Professor James Stewart. After his death his widow made over this internationally significant collection of Cypriot and other artefacts to the Museum at UNE.

UNE has had excellent relations with the AIA for a number of years. The late Mary Dolan, appointed first to the History Department, and later in Education, had a long-time association with the Institute. Over a decade ago the Institute lent to the UNE Museum of Antiquities a number of John Garstang’s finds from Jericho, together with some of Kathleen Kenyon’s material excavated at Jerusalem.

Iain Davidson, now retired from his Chair of Archaeology at UNE, dug at that site with Kenyon in the late 1960s. That display was exhibited in the Dixson Library for an extended period.