Honor Frost was a pioneer in the field of underwater archaeology, who led many Mediterranean archaeological investigations, especially in Lebanon, and was noted for her typology of stone anchors and skills in archaeological illustration.
Early life
An only child, Frost was born in Nicosia, Cyprus. She was orphaned at an early age and became the ward of Wilfred Evill, a London solicitor and art collector. She attended art school, worked on ballet set design and held a job at Tate Britain. Alongside these artistic pursuits, she was also the adventurous sort who once donned a WW2 diving suit at a friend's party in Wimbledon in order to go diving into the 17th-century well in the backyard. From this first foray into diving onward, Frost was enamoured with the practice, once claiming that, “Time spent out of the water was time wasted.”
Career
Frost became a diver soon after Cousteau's invention of SCUBA, and worked as a diver and artist in the early 1950s in France and Italy. As a member of the world's first scuba diving club, the Club Alpin Sous-Marin, her first experience of the underwater excavation of shipwrecks was with Frédéric Dumas. An expedition in Turkey resulted in the discovery of a late Bronze Age shipwreck at Gelidonya, for which Frost is credited as having realised its significance. The wreck had been previously discovered by Turkish diver Mustafa Kapkin and U.S. photo-journalist Peter Throckmorton in 1959. However, it was Frost who recognised that the wreck was not Mycenean, but Phoenician, thus providing the first evidence that Phoenicians had been trading on the seas before the Iron Age. She convinced Joan du Plat Taylor, whom she had met at the Institute of Archaeology in London, to become co-director of the excavation at Gelidonya. It was later the site of George Bass's and Peter Throckmorton's first work in underwater archaeology at Cape Gelidonya in the Antalya region of southern Turkey. The Bronze Age shipwreck, which dated to the 12th century BC, was the oldest known shipwreck in the world at that time. The excavation of this wreck is of special significance, as it was the first to be conducted following a rigorous scientific approach. In 1968 she led a UNESCO expedition to survey the Pharos site in the Port of Alexandria, for which she was later awarded, in 1997, a French government medal for pioneering submarine archaeology in Egypt. From 1971 she led the investigation of the Marsala Punic Warship in Sicily, Italy. In 2005, BSAC awarded her the Colin McLeod award for Furthering international co-operation in diving for her work in archaeology. She died on 12 September 2010. The substantial art collection that she had inherited upon Wilfred Evill's death was used to endow the Honor Frost Foundation which supplies funds for underwater archaeology in the Mediterranean.
Personal life
Frost owned a second home in Malta with her primary residence in Marylebone as inherited from Evill, where she possessed a major collection of artworks from 20th century British painters, especially those by Stanley Spencer. This collection was auctioned after her death, the proceeds of which comprise the bulk of funding for the Honor Frost Foundation.
Selected papers
Under the Mediterranean: Marine Antiquities published by Routledge
