By Amara Thornton

I've had a short guest post published on the Senate House Library blog, to accompany an exhibition currently on display in the Library. It's all about College Hall, the residence for university women in London. The Library's display contains some gems from the College Hall archive, including a few photographs of some of the Hall's residents, including Mary Brodrick and Louisa Macdonald, both of whom feature in our Beyond Notability database. You can read my post here.

By Amara Thornton

Right at the end of the September my latest Beyond Notability blog post was published. 'Modelling Excavations with Wikibase' explores how we have created a model for representing excavations on our Wikibase site, enabling us (where we have the data) to show that excavations are a community. Examples include excavations at Colchester, Essex in the 1930s, and Saqqara, Egypt in the 1900s, drawing on information archaeological reports and popular periodicals.

By Amara Thornton

This month's big news is that a project two years and a few lockdowns in the making has finally come to fruition! Strange Relics, an anthology of classic supernatural stories with an archaeological twist that I have co-edited with Dr Katy Soar, has been published by Handheld Press.

One of the inspirations behind the development of the project was my post from October 2019, #ExcavationGothic. It started an avalanche of sorts - brought me a great collaborator, Dr Katy Soar, and led me down the rabbit hole of digitised copies of Weird Tales. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have in working with Katy to bring it together! Strange Relics is available to order through Handheld Press: www.handheldpress.co.uk/shop/fantasy-and-science-fiction/strange-relics-stories-of-archaeology-and-the-supernatural/

By Amara Thornton

My post for this month on the Beyond Notability website explores the many ways in which we are approaching work, through the life of Welsh antiquarian Gwenllian Morgan. We've had some lively discussions about how we represent work, and I'm sure there are more to come! Read the post "Working with Gwenllian Morgan" here: beyondnotability.org/biographical/working-with-gwenllian-morgan/

By Amara Thornton

This month, the Beyond Notability project had its first (of three) International Women's Day events. It was a twitter takeover, and as part of it I was delighted to be able to arrange some new content - recordings of letters held in the archives of the Victoria County History (VCH). These letters were from two women who are now in our database: historian Eliza Jeffries Davis, and archaeologist Margerie Venables Taylor. Both women worked for the VCH as researchers and writers, contributing the fruits of their labours to the county histories which formed the core product of the VCH. More on the Beyond notability blog: ​beyondnotability.org/biographical/international-womens-day/

By Amara Thornton

This month's Beyond Notability post is a guided tour through the project database. We have been adding individuals, events, organisations, and more to the database over the past few months, and now have a useful set of data to help us think through how we catalogue and what we catalogue to represent women's work in archaeology, history and heritage. 

Read "Introducing Our Database" here. 

By Amara Thornton
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This month's post for Beyond Notability is a guest post on the Institute of Classical Studies blog. The subject of the post, Gertrude Rachel Levy, was a librarian for the Hellenic and Roman Societies in the 1930s and 1940s, and the ICS now holds a small collection relating to her. The post, however, focuses (thanks to the archives at the Palestine Exploration Fund) on one aspect of her life - the time she spent in Mandate Palestine and Iraq in the 1920s and 1930s. Read on at "Gertrude Rachel Levy in Mandate Palestine".

By Amara Thornton

My post for this month is on the Beyond Notability blog. It explores the Congress of Archaeological Societies (CAS), founded in 1888 as an umbrella organisation for local and regional archaeological and historical societies in Britain. We've been examining the records the Congress produced for women's names and activities. Read "The Congress of Archaeological Societies" here.

By Amara Thornton

At the beginning of the month I started a new position as Co-Investigator on a 3-year AHRC funded project. Through Beyond Notability: Re-Evaluating Women's Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage in Britain 1870-1950, I'll be able to spend time focusing on women's lives and experiences across various heritage-related fields. It's something I've been doing since I started my PhD, but it hasn't been the sole focus of my research - until now!

I've written the first post on the project's newly established blog - you can read about our first project trip to the Society of Antiquaries of London archives here.

Stay tuned for updates!

By Amara Thornton

Back in 2014, I wrote a post about an article that Agnes Conway (an archaeologist I've been researching for many years) published in the Westminster Gazette in 1914. This article, a preview (in a sense) of the book that became A Ride Through the Balkans offered readers a taste of the experience that Agnes and her travelling companion Evelyn Radford had had in Scutari just months earlier. 
 
A month or so ago I came across references to a series of three articles Agnes wrote in The Weekly Westminster Gazette (an offshoot of the aforementioned periodical) in 1923. The Weekly Westminster Gazettecan be read (on microfilm) at the British Library, and I recently made a trip there to track down the series.  
 
Her articles covered her trip, taken in 1919, to Sierra Leone, which was then under British control. While in Sierra Leone, Agnes was travelling with the colony's Governor, Richard James Wilkinson and his wife Edith (Baird) Wilkinson; thus, she rather consciously highlights the colonial hierarchies on display in the official engagements she witnessed as part of the Governor's entourage.
 
Agnes begins the series with a brief discussion of the colonial settlement of Sierra Leone. She traces this history from the 1780s with the transportation of formerly enslaved Black men and women as well as former Black Loyalist soldiers from Britain's North American colonies, who had been living in Britain. These 'settlers' had to put down roots among the Temne people who lived in the area where these families first settled; and Agnes describes how the settlers and their descendants (known as Creoles or Krios) were distinct from the Temne people.
 
Her second article, subtitled "The Waterways of Sierra Leone" describes a journey she took with the Wilkinsons to Port Loko. What stands out (depressingly) in this article is the way she describes a local boatman who objects, vociferously, to her desire to take his photograph. The language that she uses to describe the boatman and his objections are steeped in racialised terms, and she makes an explicit link between the 'local' people, as examplified by the boatman, and savagery.  Her photographs were and remain a significant resource in archaeological and historical terms, and her description of photographing this boatman makes for distressing reading.
 
The last article in the series is a detailed description of the Government's school at Bo and the plans to institute a series of schools with the aim of instructing students in the art of writing their local language, Mende, using the Roman alphabet. She chronicles how a student at the school was required to translate easily between Mende and English in order to convince visiting Chiefs to send their sons to the programme. Agnes's text highlights how colonial education was promoted locally in a fair amount of detail.
 
These articles chronicling Agnes Conway's brief but little-known trip highlight her perspectives on part of Britain's empire in Africa in ways which draw sharp attention to the assumptions, prejudices and colonial attitudes that she displays in this piece of journalism. And in her own words she reveals the invasiveness of her photography – an insight that should be taken into account when viewing the images she took.
 
References/Further Reading
 
Conway, Agnes, 1923. Aspects of Overseas Life: Sierra Leone. – I. The Weekly Westminster Gazette, 6 Jan: 8.
 
Conway, Agnes, 1923. Aspects of Overseas Life: The Waterways of Sierra Leone. – II. The Weekly Westminster Gazette, 13 Jan: 13.
 
Conway, Agnes, 1923. Aspects of Overseas Life: Sierra Leone. – III. Schools in Sierra Leone. The Weekly Westminster Gazette, 30 Jan.