Ross Iain Thomas 1978–2022

Ross Thomas, who died unexpectedly on 14^th November 2022, was an archaeologist and British Museum curator (fig. 1). He was a leading figure in the maritime archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean and an expert on the ceramics of the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine East. During a research career first at the University of Southampton and then at the British Museum, he made major contributions to the understanding of the Red Sea in antiquity and of the material culture of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. He was deeply committed to promoting the public understanding of archaeology, and a generous mentor to others. His contagious enthusiasm and generosity of spirit made him a popular and well-loved colleague. His research points the way to new understandings of the connections between the Roman Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean systems, and also to the cosmopolitan nature of ancient port cities, in particular of Naukratis, Egypt, where he directed fieldwork from 2012.

Fig. 1

Ross Thomas in the Great Court of the British Museum, 2018 (photo: Elisabeth R. O’Connell).

Archaeology captivated Ross from an early age. He grew up on the Isle of Wight surrounded by historic monuments and was fortunate to have been able to study some classics at Sandown High School through the kindness of a teacher who taught him and a few others during the lunch break. Throughout Ross’ career, he would take a particular interest in encouraging students who had limited opportunities at school. Ross went on to study Archaeology at Durham University for his BA. While a student at Durham, he arranged to be trained as a diver and worked on the underwater excavations of the port of Caesarea Maritima in Israel. These interests made it natural for him to move for postgraduate study to Southampton, the leading centre of Maritime Archaeology in the UK. His mentors there were Lucy Blue and the late David Peacock, with whom he worked first on an MA in Maritime Archaeology and then a PhD on the Maritime Cultures of the Erythrean (Red) Sea. They also encouraged him to participate in the excavations at Myos Hormos (modern Quseir al-Qadim), the eastern terminus of the route through the Eastern Desert that connected Koptos (modern Quft) on the Nile with the Indian Ocean seaways. Ross was to work at Myos Hormos for several years.

Myos Hormos was just one of a series of sites along the Red Sea coast where Ross worked as an archaeologist or ceramicist. The PhD that Ross wrote under Lucy’s supervision was designed to see how they fitted together. Ross was already an expert ceramicist and an experienced diver, so was well suited to document and describe the various pottery assemblages, but his vision was more ambitious than this. The thesis, completed in 2009, brought together maritime artefacts, faunal remains and ancient testimony to reconstruct the lifeways and identities of the different groups that met around the Red Sea littoral and on its waters. Ross understood their world as both part of a wider Indian Ocean system and as a dynamic component of Egyptian and Nabataean societies. His focus was on the first three centuries CE, the period in which Egypt and Nabataea were brought into wider Mediterranean economies created by Roman imperialism. Yet through the Red Sea they were also connected to networks of exchange and mobility that included East Africa, South Arabia, and India. The core of the study was quantitative, statistical, and mechanical. But in its interpretation, Ross was able to tell a story of fishing, of technology transfers, and developing urbanism. He refused to prioritize long distance trade in spices and incense which still dominate the literature. Instead, he focused on indigenous and local fishing populations and nomads whose worlds touched those of oceanic traders but were in many respects quite separate from them. The picture Ross developed is a model for exploring relations between local lifeways and long-distance connections in other parts of the ancient world. At the centre of Ross’ account are images of work, the labour of maintaining ships, the repair of fishing gear, the search for food and the exploitation of terrestrial resources in the service of maritime activity. In this sense the thesis also reflected his own practical understanding of life on the shore. Ross was as much at home on the water as under it. He was a confident sailor and a skilled fisherman, and he had a sailor’s understanding of boats and of maritime technology.

Ross’ work on Red Sea sites continued alongside many other projects, where he honed a wide range of skills and was consciously attentive to the qualities that made an excellent field director. Among others, he worked with Tom Parker at Aqaba (Jordan), and with Steven Sidebotham at Berenice and Sikait in the Egyptian Eastern Desert, with Neal Spencer at Kom Firin, and with David Peacock and Lucy Blue at Myos Hormos. At Berenike, Myos Hormos/Quseir al-Qadim and Alexandria, Ross worked on ceramics with his great mentor and friend Roberta Tomber. Between 2004 and 2008, Ross worked on the Graeco-Roman ceramics from over 70 sites surveyed around the shores of Lake Mareotis at Alexandria, which involved the collection and analysis of more than 12,000 sherds of pottery. This was the start of a close relationship with Alexandrine archaeologists. During and after the completion of his PhD, Ross conducted fieldwork in the UK, Italy, Jordan, Sudan and the UAE. During much of this time Ross was also teaching archaeology at Southampton.

Throughout these years, Ross increasingly found himself working alongside researchers from the British Museum, the institution which would eventually become his intellectual home. From 2006, Ross worked with BM Sudan and Nubia Curator Derek Welsby on projects for the Sudan Archaeological Research Society (SARS). This included salvage archaeology in the Fourth Nile Cataract ahead of a dam reservoir flooding sites (2006–2007) and working on ceramics at the site of Kawa (2008–2011), a major urban centre of the Napatan Empire (eighth–first centuries BCE). A monograph on the pottery from the Amri to Kirbekan Survey, co-authored by Ross and Isabella Welsby Sjöström, is scheduled to appear shortly. In 2009 he joined ancient Egypt and Sudan Curator (later Keeper) Neal Spencer’s Kom Firin project, publishing the ceramics from the Citadel. By 2010, Ross was co-director of the Red Sea Shipwrecks Project along with Lucy Blue and J. D. Hill of the British Museum. The project was a collaboration with the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt (now the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities) together with Ross’ former fellow-Southampton maritime archaeology PhD Emad Khalil, who later worked for the University of Alexandria.

In 2011, Ross was hired by the British Museum to work as Project Curator for Alexandra Villing’s flagship Naukratis: Greeks in Egypt Project. The project had begun in 2004 as an exercise in documenting and studying material from Naukratis in the Museum’s own collections. The second phase, the point at which Ross and others joined it, expanded its scope to record and study finds from the old excavations now dispersed in more than 70 museums and archives worldwide. It created a team of classical archaeologists and Egyptologists based at the Museum, but working closely with colleagues around the world. Ross’ knowledge of ancient port-cities and expertise with the material made him a perfect fit for the Naukratis Project. Over the next five years, Ross catalogued thousands of artefacts in the British Museum and other international collections, among them stone and terracotta figures; Greek sculpture and architecture; lamps; Ptolemaic, Roman and Byzantine small finds and pottery; tools; and weapons.

Ross was a stalwart archaeologist as well as an exemplary curator. Lesley Fitton, his former colleague, wrote ‘Ross used the most modern methods, and had all the technological and digital know-how in the world, but I still somehow think of him as an example of a good, old-fashioned field archaeologist, getting his hands dirty (or wet, when underwater!) whenever he could.’ When the opportunity came to conduct new fieldwork at the site of Naukratis, Ross leapt at the chance. The aim was to provide a physical and topographical context for understanding the mass of material brought out of Naukratis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (fig. 3). Ross realized that without going back to the original site, any new understanding of the material would always be limited. After investigative seasons, he secured funding from the Honor Frost Foundation (HFF) to direct fieldwork at the site and then publish it. At Naukratis, he carried out geophysical and palaeoenvironmental surveys, relating these to the records of the nineteenth century excavations to create the first accurate map of the site and model of the city’s built landscape.

Fig. 2

Ross Thomas recording ancient pottery during an underwater archaeological survey in the Red Sea, 2011 (photo: J. D. Hill).

Fig. 3

Naukratis in Egypt, a 3D rendering of the ancient port city, created by Grant Cox based on research by the British Museum’s Naukratis Project, for which Ross Thomas directed the fieldwork (photo: the British Museum).

Much of Ross’s work is visible in the project’s online research catalogue Naukratis: Greeks in Egypt . More is published in editions of the online British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan (BMSAES). Together with Alexandra Villing, Aurélia Masson-Berghoff and other British Museum colleagues, Ross ran a series of workshops and meetings in London, the proceedings of which he and Aurélia co-edited for a special issue of BMSAES. His volume with Aurélia on the American Research Center in Egypt’s survey, The Western Nile Delta: ARCE Fieldwork in the Region of Kom Firin and Naukratis (1977–1983) Revisited, is imminent at the time of writing. He gave lectures on the Museum’s work in Rome, Fremantle, Cairo, Wurzburg, Istanbul, Paris, Kyoto and to many meetings and organizations in London, and in 2015 he and Alexandra gave the fourth annual lecture of the Honor Frost Foundation. The HFF monograph series publication of the British Museum Naukratis excavation seasons (2012–2019), on which he was working at the time of his death, will also appear shortly.

For Ross, curatorial duties also brought new opportunities for outreach and mentoring, roles in which he excelled. Camille Acosta, now a professor at the University of California, Irvine, credits Ross with starting her out in archaeology. While studying in London she attended a tour of the museum led by Ross and was so inspired by it that she began three years work as a volunteer at the Museum. Camille describes the care Ross took to teach her new skills, and to give her the chance to familiarize herself with different parts of the collection. It was Ross who encouraged her to join the BM team to conduct fieldwork in Egypt, and Ross who made possible her first publication. Neal Spencer tells a similar story about how Ross trained a young Egyptian archaeologist, Mohamed Ali Hakim, in the field and continued to mentor him for a decade.

Ross was a natural communicator in every medium. He had a gift for bringing vivid stories out of a mass of dense quantitative data, extracting human narratives from vast spreadsheets and massed pie-charts. Ross wrote vividly about Naukratis for a range of BM publications including The British Museum Young Friends Magazine. He gave talks on the project to general audiences in London, around the UK and in Damanhur, Egypt to the community that today live around or near the site of Naukratis. He was equally at home doing interviews for television series on the ancient world or conducting the Guardian journalist Charlotte Higgins around the excavations at Naukratis. Ross took the lead in curating the Roman Egypt section of the 2016 Sunken Cities exhibition, which presented material from Naukratis to provide context for the objects found more recently in underwater excavations at Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion. The British Museum was perfect for Ross, but he saw it not just as a centre for drawing in visitors, but as a base from which to reach out to new audiences. He was the lead curator on a Spotlight Tour that took Naukratis to museums in Cirencester, Nottingham, and South Shields.

Ross worked phenomenally hard over this period but remained as generous as ever with his time. He served as Trustee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, and did committee work for them and for the Egypt Exploration Society. In 2018, he was also elected to the Council of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. He was a tireless reviewer for various journals of North African, Near Eastern and nautical archaeology. For the Sudan Archaeological Research Society, Ross directed the first season of a project in Sudan’s Dongola Reach which would provide perspectives on the transition to and from a period of Pharaonic colonialism. For the Museum, he took on the coordination of fieldwork on the Panatello Project at the Villa Hadriana in Tivoli, Italy, working alongside his colleague Thorsten Opper. Final publications on these projects will further underline Ross’ skills and ability to master new corpora of material culture.

In 2016, Ross was appointed to a permanent curatorship in the Department of Greece and Rome. I sat as an external member of the appointment committee and have vivid memories of his energy and excitement about what he might do in the role. Also clear was the sheer breadth of his interests and expertise, well beyond the material and sites he had made his name on. Ross was full of ideas, and as soon as he was appointed, he began putting them into action. He now became part of a team curating the British Museum’s vast holdings from the classical Mediterranean, material accumulated over two and a half centuries, much of it still poorly understood. Ross took on this material with relish, especially the less glamorous categories of small finds. His contribution to BM object documentation cannot be overstated. With the help of the large number of volunteers he supervised, Ross improved documentation for over 23,500 object records in the British Museum’s collection database, including the creation of over 7,000 records from scratch, and providing images for them. Working with colleagues in archaeological science, he was able to show that a collection of Roman glass paste gems were indeed ancient, when they had been assumed to be modern, and he was able to establish provenances for a large group of bronze figures to the cities of Vesuvius. For the latter topic, he was able to secure AHRC collaborative doctoral award funding for a joint BM-Reading University PhD student who started in 2021. A project on a ship prow from Actium, in the collection since 1872, led to a collaboration to work on similar material from Egadi off Sicily. Naukratis of course continued alongside all this.

Ross also represented the Greece and Rome Department on the British Museum’s International Training Programme. This scheme brings curators, other museum professionals and archaeologists from around the world to London for a month to share experiences, network, learn new skills, find out about current practice in UK museums, and spend time with collections and specialists pertinent to their own research. Ross acted as lead for those attached to the Department of Greece and Rome and tried each year to match this to the experiences and interests of each cohort. For Ross, this programme meant much more than formal instruction. He organized day trips out to visit other collections and memorably to visit the Mary Rose at Portsmouth which he used to describe as ‘a museum that is an object and an object that is a museum’. When his death was announced, the Museum received dozens of testimonials from former participants who wrote of his kindness and generosity, as well as of his great knowledge of archaeology and his sense of humour.

Ross was widely respected and admired for his knowledge and energy. More of his research will be published over the coming years. A large part of it concerns Naukratis but there is also a mass of other publications reflecting his wider maritime interests. There is a monograph chapter on fishing tackle from the fourth century BCE Greek Kyrenia shipwreck; another documents timber analyses from the wrecks of Roman and Punic warships that clashed at the battle of the Egadi Islands off northwest Sicily in 241 BCE. Almost everything Ross published and that remains to be published was written jointly with others. This is not unusual for an archaeologist to be sure, but it is also an expression of Ross’ natural appetite for working with others, and of his constant concern that every participant should be given the credit that is their due.

Ross Thomas was born in Newport on the Isle of Wight on 7^th May 1978. He grew up in the small town of Brading to which he remained deeply attached throughout his life. At his memorial service, his brother Bryn remembered a happy childhood, much of it spent on the beach and at the island’s various historic monuments. Early life with his father Nigel, an amateur geologist and fossil hunter, and mother Angela, an artist, prepared him for his future pursuits. It was in St Mary’s Church in Brading that Ross married Dr Elisabeth R. O’Connell, also a British Museum curator, in 2014, with their wedding reception held at Brading Roman Villa. Ross often used to say that growing up near the villa and by the sea had inspired his future interests. In 2021 Ross became a Trustee of Brading Roman Villa. Ross and Elisabeth returned to the family home there often with their children Ethan and Ayla.