Explorer of the Deep: The Extraordinary Life of Honor Frost and the Dawn of Underwater Archaeology

A glittering, sun-drenched biography of diver Honor Frost, who pioneered underwater archeology amidst the sunken ships of the Mediterranean.

Honor Frost was born in 1917 into upper class British society in Cyprus, where as a child she scavenged for fossil and swam in the sea. As a young woman she attended art school in England, then drove ambulances in London during the war, and then held a prestigious position at the Tate Museum after the war. On vacation in Cannes in the early 1950s, Frost met Jacques Cousteau and began diving, an activity which was still new and incredibly dangerous, and almost exclusively male. Frost fell in love with diving, became a member of the world’s first SCUBA club, and started exploring the local shipwrecks on the sea floor, where objects were treated as souvenirs or treasure to be scavenged.

It was on an archaeological dig in Jericho in 1957 when Frost realized the same excavation techniques used on land could be replicated underwater, as shipwrecks yielded important knowledge about the ancient world. In Gelidonya, Turkey in 1959 she unearthed a Phoenician ship, the oldest known shipwreck in the world at the time, and the first to be fully excavated underwater. Working with a young archeology student, George Bass, Frost watched as he went on to claim credit for the techniques she used, building an illustrious career, while her name and contributions were entirely ignored. Frost persisted in uncovering and preserving history buried underneath the waves. Over the next 40 years, she would go on to discover immense stone statues from the Lighthouse at Alexandria, and the only known Punic war ship off the coast of Sicily.

Using firsthand research and access to Honor Frost’s archives, this will be the first biography of an extraordinary and groundbreaking life that has been mostly written out of history.