BREAKING THE SURFACE

The Extraordinary Life of Honor Frost and the Dawn of Underwater Archaeology

Janna Brancolini

In this first and official biography of Honor Frost, award-winning journalist Janna Brancolini relates the dazzling life of the British woman who pushed boundaries on land and at sea to pioneer the field of underwater archaeology. With BREAKING THE SURFACE, Frost takes her place in history among the daring few who revolutionised our understanding of where we come from, offering new possibilities for where we might be going.

Born in Cyprus in 1917 to a Scottish mother and an English father, Honor was orphaned at an early age. Uprooted from her Mediterranean home and sent to live with a guardian in London, like Freya Stark a generation before her, she overcame early challenges to become one of Britain's great but unheralded female adventurers. A polymath at the intersection of art and science, she dedicated her life to exploring the waters of the Mediterranean, safely unearthing millennia of buried treasure, mapping one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and helping to develop the preservation techniques that remain a gold standard today.

Honor was an unlikely deep sea explorer. A gifted illustrator from childhood, she was appointed by the Tate to start the museum’s publishing programme in the days after World War II and her circle of friends included Britain's major post-war artists including Lucien Freud; with the petite frame of a former ballerina, she worked for a time as an award-winning set designer for Sadler’s Wells. But in the early 1950s while on a trip to the French Riviera to recover from ill health, she learned to dive with a group of naval researchers experimenting with the aqua-lung technology they had invented. Jacques Cousteau’s team gave the spirited young British woman free diving lessons and she became one of the world’s first recreational SCUBA divers, accompanying the crew regularly on their early underwater explorations.

However it was in Palestine, working as the illustrator for an archaeological dig led by Kathleen Kenyon, that Honor had the epiphany which changed her life and our understanding of maritime exploration. So why is it that the field of underwater archaeology is credited to two American men?

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Janna Brancolini is an award-winning journalist based in Milan, Italy. She covers environmental policy for Bloomberg Law and writes about Italy for the Los Angeles Times. Her essays and photography have appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Business Insider and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She moderates events for the Foreign Press Association in Italy and serves on the jury of the Globo d’Oro Italian film awards.