What’s happening in the archive?

Well, it’s been busy round here. The new rolling stacks have made a big difference to life in the archive. At last the archives are beginning to be more accessible. Thank you, School of Archaeology!

Before the stacks went in, everything that used to be in the basement space had to be cleared out, which led to some interesting new discoveries…

It isn’t too attractive at first sight, but someone had written ‘Jacquetta Hawkes? Portugal?’ on the side, so we started taking everything out of the box and found some treasures, including:

These objects were collected during Jacquetta Hawkes’ trip to Portugal in 1950. We’ve set an undergraduate volunteer onto the task of cataloguing the material and finding out more about it.

There was also evidence of the building’s previous incarnation as home to the Department for the History of Art…Useful advice on how to handle albums. On the subject of albums, new acquisitions  include a set of books and papers..

The scrapbook belonged to the Reverend Greville John Chester, and the photographs inside appear to come from the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem in 1864-5, by James McDonald:

It’s going to be interesting researching the collection: we’ll be adding the photographs to the HEIR on-line database.

We’ve also been busy with archive visitors, including one who also brought some material for us to look at relating to the Stuart Piggott archive. Piggott wrote some notes about archaeology on a sheet of scrap paper torn in half. Inevitably, we found ourselves more interested in the ‘wrong’ side of the paper, which is a reminder that Piggott was not going to let the small detail of the Second World War and his army enlistment get in the way of research. We suspect Piggott was responsible for the sketch…