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
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
I've returned recently to research on artists working within archaeology, specifically women artists. This is a topic I've been gathering information on for a number of years, bolstered by my acquisition of a second-hand copy of Jessie Mothersole's Hadrian's Wall. To my surprise and delight when I opened the book for the first time I saw that it included a nearly century-old an invitation to an exhibition of her original artwork (you can read that here). Winifred Brunton is another archaeological artist I've been researching. She was slightly younger than Jessie Mothersole, but was exhibiting her work at around the same time, and sometimes on the same street and in the same exhibition. I've discussed the work Brunton, Mothersole and other women artists in archaeology displayed at the Royal Academy Summer exhibitions here (thanks to the excellent resource that is chronicle250.com), but in this post I want to delve a bit more deeply into Brunton as a working artist before she came to Britain.* Winifred Brunton was born Winifred Newberry in South Africa in 1880. Her father Charles was a wealthy landowner and developer who had come to South Africa from Britain and married Elizabeth Mary Daniel, the South-African born daughter of a Wesleyan missionary. Their marriage certificate indicates that, at the time of their marriage, Charles Newberry already had acquired shares in the Kimberley Diamond Mine, tying him firmly into the colonial exploitation of the region's mineral wealth, and the people who mined there. Brunton grew up at the family estate at Prynnsberg, near Clocolan in the Orange Free State, which had been formally incorporated into the British Empire at the close of the 2nd Boer War in 1902. During her early years in South Africa, the area in which she grew up was known first as the Orange Free State, then the Orange River Colony annexed to Britain, and then incorporated, as the province of Orange Free State, into the Union of South Africa, a British dominion created in 1910. The British administration established a Land settlement scheme in 1901, which saw over 500 settlers acquire land there by the end of the scheme in 1912. Winifred Newberry married Guy Brunton in South Africa in 1906, when she was 26. Born in England, Guy Brunton had come to South Africa, presumably, for work. In 1911 it was reported that he was serving on the Board of Charles Newberry's "Newberry (Orange River) Estates Ltd", which was undertaking irrigation works in the region to make the land more agriculturally productive – and profitable. Winifred, meanwhile, living with her husband in Berea, a residential suburb of the fast-evolving city of Johannesburg (Transvaal Province), was starting to bring her art to public notice as part of the emerging South African National Union. This organisation was established to provide a platform for "South African" products, including fine and decorative art. In 1910, she was helping to organise an Arts & Crafts exhibition, at which her miniatures were on display (and for which she won a prize). A year later, her design for postage stamps for the new Union (bringing together the previously separate and independent provinces in South Africa) also received a prize.* By the end of 1911, Winifred and Guy Brunton were in London embarking on studies in Egyptology at UCL, and Winifred continued to develop a successful career as an artist, as well as an excavator. The move to London connected the Bruntons more firmly to another part of Britain's expansive Empire – Egypt, which had been occupied by Britain in 1882 and would be annexed by the end of 1914. They remained attached to Egypt as excavators and residents for several decades before returning again to South Africa. Winifred Brunton's Egyptian paintings and excavations remain the most visible of her long career, but her beginnings in art and empire in South Africa are, I think, of equal significance. *Sadly, it appears that none of the prize-winning designs submitted for this competition actually became stamps. References/Further Reading Brown, A. Samler and Brown, George (Eds.). 1915. The Guide to South and East Africa for the use of tourists, sportsmen, invalids and settlers. (21st edn). London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co. Cape Times, 1911. Orange River Irrigation. A Big Scheme. 23 Sept: 10. Mafeking Mail and Protectorate Guardian, 1909. South African National Union. 30 Aug. National Museum Publications, 2020. Experience ancient Egypt through the Collections of an Egyptologist. Rand Daily Mail, 1910. Arts & Crafts Exhibition. One Great Success. 29 March. Rand Daily Mail, 1911. Gazette Gleanings. 1 June: 2. Stevenson, Alice. 2014. Camden, Cairo and the Cape. UCL Culture blog. By Amara Thornton
Back in 2016 a colleague tweeted a picture from the 1951 Festival of Britain. It showed an archaeological display in the Festival's Dome of Discovery. I was immediately intrigued, and even bought some vintage Festival ephemera with a plan to write a blog post about it. My planned post never materialised, but luckily I have recently had the opportunity to write about archaeology at the Festival, as a response to Jacquetta Hawkes' book A Land (1951) as part of the Museum of English Rural Life's 51 Voices exhibition. Read "Jaquetta Hawkes' Festival Lands" here. By Amara Thornton
I spent quite a bit of 2020 researching the history of archaeology in the Caribbean. Last month I launched a website that included digital interactive on archaeological collections histories linking Britain and Barbados. Among the locations highlighted on the map of Britain in "Mapping Collections Histories" is South Kensington, where in 1886 the Colonial and Indian Exhibition took place. I've been interested in temporary exhibitions of archaeology for years now; my initial efforts to trace the small annual temporary displays of material excavated by British archaeologists in Egypt, Sudan, Palestine and Iraq in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was published in 2015. There were displays of archaeological material in World's Fairs, too - I've blogged about the displays of ancient Egyptian artefacts at the 1904 World's Fair in "I'll Meet You in St Louis". The Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886 included displays of 'archaeological' material (by which I mean artefacts that were at the time considered to be material culture from the ancient Indigenous peoples of the islands, usually called "Carib relics") from across the Caribbean, including Barbados, St Kitts, British Guiana (Guyana), Dominica, St Vincent, Jamaica, and Trinidad. But as I've recently found out, it wasn't the first time collections of artefacts from the Caribbean were brought together. In 1879, a series of local exhibitions were instigated in British Guiana, in part to strengthen ties and encourage friendly competition between colonies in the Caribbean. A description of the 1882 exhibition was published in Timehri, the journal of the colony's Agricultural and Commercial Society. The displays were grouped into two broad categories – sugar, and everything else. The second (miscellaneous) group included manufactured products, and antiquities. The exhibition featured two collections, one of artefacts from St Vincent belonging to Edward Leycester Atkinson, and the other from St Lucia, belonging to a Mr Rousselet. The following exhibition did not take place until November 1885, on a slightly grander scale. The British Guiana and West Indian Exhibition featured displays from Guiana and beyond. It was hoped that other islands would contribute, but the Timehri report on the exhibition noted that calls for displays for the Colonial and Indian exhibition had diverted much desired material to London. Among the islands that did respond were St Vincent, Tobago, Trinidad and Dominica. Again among the Miscellaneous group of the exhibition were collections of artefacts for display. Dr Henry A. Alford Nicholls, an English physician resident in Dominica who had an interest in zoology and horticulture, sent a collection of antiquities from that island (for which he won a prize). These had been previously displayed at an exhibition in the Courthouse, in Roseau, Dominica's capital, held to fundraise to cover the expense of shipping items to British Guiana for exhibition. Another collection on display in 1885 was uncovered in the grounds of a sugar plantation, Enmore, in British Guiana. This plantation had been in the hands of the Porter family for over a century. It was Rashleigh Porter, great-grandson of the first Porter (Thomas) who had established the plantation, who reported the discovery of artefacts, including stone tools and "some grotesque clay figures, of a highly artistic kind", as the Editor of Timerhi Everard im Thurn reported. Another rich seam of artefacts was uncovered when agricultural digging on the estate revealed deposits of pottery sherds and human and animal remains. Some of the details about these 'local' (to the Caribbean) exhibitions come from digitised newspapers that have recently been added to the British Library's British Newspaper Archive. In the announcement promoting these newly added resources, the British Library has signalled a commitment to incorporate more colonial papers (and thereby colonial histories). Among the lot available now are searchable papers from Dominica, Jamaica, Barbados and Belize (formerly British Honduras). These now join other digitised searchable resources (see my post "Building Collections Histories") revealing various aspects of the history of the Caribbean in the 19th and 20th centuries. I'm looking forward to exploring these further, and to seeing the collection of available searchable material grow in the coming months! References/Further Reading [Exhibition] Committee, 1885. British Guiana and West Indian Exhibition, 1885. Timehri 4: 268-293 Dominica Dial [Advertisement for Exhibition at Courthouse] [British Newspaper Archive] 24 Oct. Dominica Dial, 1885 British Guiana and West Indian Exhibition. [British Newspaper Archive] 21 Nov. im Thurn, E. 1882. The British Guiana Exhibition of 1882. Timehri 1: 100-117. im Thurn, E. 1884. West Indian Stone Implements; and other Indian Relics (Illustrated). Timehri 3: 103-137. By Amara Thornton
This month I launched the website for a project I've been working on for the past few months: Narrating the Diverse Past. It was a joint University of Reading and British Museum partnership project, and had a number of different parts. One of the parts was a digital interactive exhibition, "Mapping Collections Histories: Connecting Barbados and Britain". This grew somewhat organically from the research I began earlier in the summer (see Colonial Archaeology in the Caribbean), but with a focus on histories of archaeological collections that connected Barbados to Britain (as the title suggests). I've explored some of the storylines in this exhibition via threads on Twitter, but in this post I want to talk a bit more about the illustrations that accompany my text in the exhibition. These are the work of Michelle Keeley-Adamson, whose illustrations from historic excavation photographs I was introduced to during the summer. The Mapping Collections Histories exhibition features three different maps. The base map shows Britain and Barbados "in context" as it were, with a dotted line to highlight the distance (and connection) between them. This is loosely based on an old map of the British Empire. Then there are separate maps of Britain and Barbados. The Barbados map shows the basic outline of the parish boundaries (the equivalent, basically, of counties in the UK), and has 5 illustrations superimposed to highlight five locations relevant to the theme of the exhibition. Each illustration draws inspiration from historic photographs or drawings that we found online. The illustration for Farley Hill, home of Barbadian collector Thomas Graham Briggs, was based on an old postcard; the drawings for Mount Ararat Estate and Conset point were based on illustrations in an article published in 1870 by the British antiquarian Greville Chester, who explored, collected and conducted an excavation during his roughly year long residence in Barbados in the late 1860s. The illustration for Bridgetown is based on historic photographs of the city streets. The illustration for Codrington College is based on photographs from old Barbados guidebooks online. For the Britain map, again we turned to historic images found online and digitised books. One of the most exciting elements of this map for me was seeing Michelle's recreated display interiors for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition 1886, drawing inspiration from sketches in the Illustrated London News and Frank Cundall's Reminiscences of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition. The Blackmore Collection in Salisbury image is based on old photographs and an Illustrated London News drawing of the interior of the museum, which was closed in 1930s. I hope you enjoy the exhibition as much as I enjoyed creating it! By Amara Thornton
For the past few months, I have been investigating the history of archaeology and archaeological collecting in the Caribbean island of Barbados in some detail. This is part of my current research project called "Narrating the Diverse Past" (of which more to come!). As one of the oldest English colonies in the Caribbean, first established in the 1620s, Barbados's long historic connection to the UK pre-dates the Acts of Union which brought England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland together to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (now the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland). These connections are becoming more visible in the heritage landscape in Britain today. Reports on historic properties and monuments connections to the Caribbean have been produced by English Heritage (2007,2013) and, most recently, the National Trust (2020) and the Colonial Countryside project. Work is ongoing in Scotland exposing the links between Scottish heritage sites and houses and slavery. The Legacies of British Slaveownership database is also an important resource for exploring links between Britain and Barbados, as it pulls together records on individuals who received compensation for the freeing of the enslaved people forced to make the Caribbean a profitable enterprise for others. These projects have drawn much attention both to the horrors of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and to the diversity of the beneficiaries of the compensation, the debt for which the UK Treasury only paid off in 2015. But my primary area of focus has been on the period after slavery was abolished, and aspects of the continuation of the connection between Britain and Barbados during the rest of the colonial period (Barbados gained independence in 1966, and just this year the Barbados government announced it would no longer have the Queen as head of state). One of the ways in which this post-slavery connection can be explored is through university records. Beyond Oxford and Cambridge these records can be difficult to source, depending on how universities recorded the student body over time, and how much effort (and resource) has been devoted historically to maintaining and researching these records. However, Oxford and Cambridge are a useful starting point, particularly because both Universities attracted students whose families had long-standing connections to Barbados (some established during the days of slavery and continued through sugar production after emancipation) and because many Oxford and Cambridge graduates were employed in various roles in administration, education, and the military, across the British Empire. Cambridge University has developed an online searchable database for its student records, and these records comprise an illuminating dataset for British-Caribbean connections (see also the Black Cantabs project). Combining biographical details from published student records produced in the early 20th century, with lists of students attending Cambridge's women's colleges (women attending Cambridge could not be full members of the University, or get Cambridge degrees, until 1948), this database is a valuable historical resource. The records it pulls together for Barbados, for example, show that Barbados' Cambridge connections stretch back to the late 17th century. The more than 320 records of students with links to Barbados cover various relationships to the island: students who were born there, whose parents were born there, who worked there, who inherited property there, who married someone from there, who died there – and sometimes a combination of all of these. For my purposes, at least two of these student records are significant in the archaeological collecting history of Barbados (though I suspect there are probably more). Thomas Graham Briggs (1833-1887, B. A. 1856, M. A. 1862) and John Poyer Poyer (1843-1925, B. A. 1866, M. A. 1869) both exhibited artefacts from Barbados in the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition. Both men had family estates in Barbados. At present I know nothing about John Poyer Poyer's collection, beyond the fact that his "Carib relics" were on display in the Barbados room of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition. Historic records and artefacts from Barbados belonging to Thomas Graham Briggs were on display in various parts of the exhibition. A selection of Briggs' artefacts is now in the British Museum, acquired a year or so after his death in London in 1887. According to the Museum's Collections Online, these are not from Barbados but rather a smattering of other Caribbean islands, including Nevis, where Briggs owned three estates in addition to his estates in Barbados. (There will be more from me on Thomas Graham Briggs and his artefacts coming soon.) These two individual stories are just the tip of the iceberg, as the saying goes, in exploring the educational connections between Britain and the Caribbean. I hope that more UK universities can put resources into investigating and publicising their institutional histories and student records to reveal these imperial connections. The University of Edinburgh has begun this work with its Uncover-Ed project; Pamela Roberts has been working at Oxford on the Black Oxford project. The University of Glasgow, similarly, has a website for its historical international student body called International Story. Codrington College in Barbados (Thomas Graham Briggs' alma mater) had a historic tie with the University of Durham from 1875 to 1955, during which students could take degrees from Durham. In the 19th century the UK university sector expanded significantly as universities and university colleges opened in various cities and towns across England. I'd love to know how many Barbadians were able to take up opportunities to study here during that period, and what happened to them... By Amara Thornton I've been researching the history of archaeology for over a decade now, concentrating on excavations done in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. That's due entirely to the fact that my PhD research began with the archive of two British archaeologists who worked in Jordan; this and my subsequent research has focused in various ways on the network of British archaeologists they were a part of. The countries this network was active in – Egypt and Sudan, Mandate Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq – were tied to the British Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in one way or another. But there is another part of the British Empire that I've neglected in research terms, and it's a lot closer to 'home'. That part is the Caribbean, and its where half of my own heritage lies. Lately, I've been taking a closer look at the history of archaeology in the Caribbean. Now, I'm not an expert on Caribbean history. Having grown up in the US, it's not something I learned in school (though had I grown up in Britain, I wouldn't have learned about it in school either). That's partly why I'm writing this post. But I'm also intrigued to find out how the history of archaeology and development of (for want of a better term) archaeological 'heritage' infrastructure in the British Caribbean compares with the British-occupied countries I've spent so long researching. Antiquities from the Caribbean were being actively collected and displayed in Britain by the 19th century, including at the Blackmore Museum in Salisbury, and in large-scale exhibitions such as the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in South Kensington. In the Caribbean (as far I understand at the moment) the island with the most formally organised archaeological infrastructure at that time was Jamaica, the largest island in the British Caribbean, and the island with the largest population. English forces captured Jamaica in 1655; it became a colony in 1670. By the mid-19th century it had two 'scientific' societies – the General Agricultural Society of Jamaica and the Society of Arts. These two organisations merged in 1864, and from this foundation the Institute of Jamaica came into being in 1879. The maintenance of a library, reading-room and museum and the provision of programmes of lectures were part of the Institute's charter. Members were elected, and had to pay membership fees. Following the exhibition of antiquities in Jamaica's 1891 International Exhibition, the Institute's work in the mid-1890s began to focus more particularly on archaeology and history. Two consecutive lecture series (costing 5 shillings a ticket, half price for members) given during this time were "Greek Life and Literature" and "The History of Jamaica". William Cowper, later principal of Wolmer Free School, delivered both series. In addition, the Institute's journal began publishing reports on archaeological discoveries made on the island. These chronicle the work of Jamaican residents (some of whom were descendants of slave-holding plantation owning families) in uncovering the remains of the island's ancient inhabitants. Where possible, links have been integrated in what follows to the Legacies of British Slave-ownership Database. In 1894, James Edwin Duerden, a British zoologist, was appointed Curator of the Museum. While the original focus of the collections had been natural history specimens, under his aegis in the summer of 1895 a circular was sent out for collections of Jamaican antiquities to be loaned for exhibition. This circular was inspired in part by discoveries made by Irish artist and naturalist Lady Edith Blake (resident in Jamaica at the time with her husband Henry Arthur Blake, the colonial Governor of Jamaica). She had written up her work formally in an article in the Victoria Quarterly, a journal of the Victoria Institute, a Jamaica-based learned society. She also wrote a general history of Jamaica's ancient inhabitants for Appleton's Popular Science Magazine. At the moment, I can't find a copy of her Victoria Quarterly article online, but the American traveller and author Frederick A. Ober quoted her description of the excavations she directed at Northbrook (Norbrook) in St Andrews parish near Kingston in his 1895 article "Aborigines of the West Indies". Exhibitors in the 1895-6 Institute of Jamaica museum display included Lady Blake and "Miss Moulton Barrett", daughter of Charles John Moulton-Barrett who was poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's brother (stay tuned for more on "Miss Moulton Barrett" in due course). Duerden followed up on various leads identified in the reports gathered from residents, and his 1897 publication "Aboriginal Indian Remains in Jamaica" (Vol II No 4 of the Institute's Journal) gives a fascinating insight into the community of 'amateur archaeologists' on the island. In fact, it's clear from this that the Institute of Jamaica seems to have been rather a hub for the archaeology of the Caribbean. The exhibition featured artefacts found not only in Jamaica but also in Grenada and Barbados (sent by a Rev. T. W. Bindley of Barbados) and British Guiana (now Guyana), and communications on antiquities were received from Dr C. W. Branch in St Kitts. With the end of the exhibition the artefacts displayed were scattered far beyond Jamaica. In his 1915 book Historic Jamaica, Institute of Jamaica Secretary Frank Cundall noted (in a prescient observation given current repatriation debates): "it is to be regretted that many of the objects shown at the exhibition of native remains held at the Institute of Jamaica in 1895...should have been allowed to leave the island. Such things once lost can rarely be regained." At least some of the objects from Jamaica (like these artefacts attributed to Lady Edith Blake as owner) are now held by the National Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States. The two islands that have the greatest familial significance for me are Grenada and Barbados. As far as I know from family history research, the majority of my Caribbean ancestors lived for at least a century in Barbados (a colony from 1627) until they emigrated to Grenada (a colony from 1763) at the turn of the 20th century. My grandparents subsequently moved from Grenada to Trinidad (a colony from 1797, where members of the government started plans to create a museum in the 1880s). Guidebooks from the early 20th century noted that those interested in antiquities in Grenada could take themselves to Mount Rich, on the grounds of a former sugar plantation in St Patrick's parish on the north of the island, where ancient petroglyphs could be seen carved on the surface of the rock. An English minister and resident in nearby St Vincent, Thomas Huckerby, wrote a paper on these petroglyphs in 1921. Antiquities from Grenada were also displayed in the 1905 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, held at the Crystal Palace. In Barbados, meanwhile, by the late 19th century a collection of antiquities, described by a visitor as "a litter of Carib curiosities", could be seen at Farley Hill Mansion in St Peter's parish, the home of Sir (Thomas) Graham Briggs. In St John's parish near Codrington College (the only institution of higher education on the island) could be found more remains of the ancient indigenous population. These were described briefly by British antiquarian Rev. Greville Chester in his 1869 travelogue Transatlantic Sketches. Chester noted the work of one Barbados-based antiquarian and school teacher W. A. Culpeper, whom he met in Barbados during his 1867 trip to the Caribbean. Subsequently Chester donated artefacts from Codrington to the British Museum (though these are not on display). By the early 1890s in his History and Guide to Barbados James H. Stark wrote a plea for an antiquities museum to be established on the island. Eventually, a "cabinet of antiquities" could be seen at Codrington College. Much of the publication of Caribbean archaeology (in this case meaning indigenous native American) during the early 20th century was done by men funded in the United States. Jesse Walter Fewkes and Theodoor de Booy were financed by American banker and collector George Gustav Heye, whose collection was originally shown in his own museum in New York before he set up National Museum of the American Indian in 1916. Their reports were published in American scientific journals, and reprinted in the National Museum's later series. It's critical to note, however, that many of the people coming across the remnants of the lives of the ancient inhabitants of these islands were enslaved or the descendants of enslaved people. They were employed in plowing fields and cutting or digging holes for planting sugar cane. They would also have been the people actually labouring on the excavations conducted. In one of Chester's excavations at a cave on the Mount Ararat Estate in St Michael's parish, Barbados, they were convicts, loaned by the Governor for the purpose. Their names are not mentioned in informal or formal published reports. In one heartbreaking case reported in the Institute Journal, on the grounds of the former sugar plantation Wales Estate (Trelawney, Jamaica) the remains of ancient indigenous habitation were mixed in with the material remains of enslaved people whose then-abandoned home had been built on top. Such moments of discovery were also reported through memories, which were then written into archaeological reports to provide context for collections. Following his trip to Barbados in 1912-13, Jesse Fewkes noted "A negro woman, who lives in the plain near the caves [at Mount Gilboa (now Mount Gay), St Lucy's parish, near the former estate of John Pickering] told the author that shell chisels had been found within her memory on the talus below the caves...." Nearly half a century earlier, West India Regiment Lieutenant Alwin S. Bell wrote in a letter from Falmouth, Jamaica (later read out at a meeting of the British Archaeological Association) that he discovered Black Jamaicans possessed ancient stone tools, which they put in water jars to keep the water cool. He collected some from them, reporting I have since obtained several, in all about thirty (mostly from the old black people, formerly slaves) in the country districts. These have all been found at various periods, but chiefly during the slave time, when the greater portion of the island was under cultivation." One could argue, then, that the enslaved and formerly enslaved people were the original explorers, excavators and collectors in the Caribbean.
References/Further Reading 1922.Thirty-Fourth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: Government Printing Office. Allsworth-Jones, Philip. 2008. Pre-Columbian Jamaica. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Atkinson, Lesley-Gail. 2006. The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of the Jamaican Taino. University of West Indies Press. Blake, Lady Edith. 1890. The Norbrook Kitchen Midden. Victoria Quarterly (October). Blake, Lady Edith. 1897/8. Aborigines of the West Indies. Appleton's Popular Science Monthly 52: 373-487. Chester, Greville J. 1870. The Shell-Implements and Other Antiquities of Barbados. Archaeological Journal27: 43-53. Chester, Greville J. 1869. Transatlantic Sketches in the West Indies, South America, Canada, and the United States.London: Smith, Elder & Co. Cuming, H. Syer. 1868. Proceedings of the British Archaeological Association. Journal of the British Archaeological Association 24 (4): 391-404. Curet, L. Antonio and Maria Galban. 2019. Theodoor de Booy: Caribbean Expeditions and Collections at the National Museum of the American Indian. Journal of Caribbean Archaeology 19. Duerden, James E. 1897. Aboriginal Indian Remains in Jamaica. Journal of the Institute of Jamaica2 (4). Ellwood, C. V. and J. M. V. Harvey, 1990. The Lady Blake Collection: Catalogue of Lady Edith Blake's Collection of Drawings of Jamaican Lepidoptera and Plants.Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History)18 (2): 145-202. Ford, J. C. and Findlay, A. A. C. 1903. The Handbook of Jamaica. London: Stanford. Franks, A. W. 1868. British Museum Guide to the Christy Collection of Prehistoric Antiquities and Ethnology.London: British Museum. Howard, Robert R. 1956. The Archaeology of Jamaica: A Preliminary Survey. American Antiquity 22 (1): 45-59. Huckerby, Thomas. 1921. Petroglyphs of Grenada and a Recently Discovered Petroglyph in St Vincent. Indian Notes and Monographs. Keegan, William F., Hoffman, Corinne L. and Reinel Rodriguez Ramos. (Eds.). 2013. The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maderson, Paul. 2014. James Edwin Duerden 1865-1937: Zoological polymath. In Jackson, Patrick N. Wyse and Mary E. Spencer Jones (Eds.) Annals of Bryozoology 4: aspects of the history of research on bryozoans: 231-265. Ober, Frederick. 1895. Aborigines of the West Indies. Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. Vol 9. Pepper, George H. The Museum of the American Indian. Heye Foundation. The Geographical Review 2 (6): 401-18. Stevens, Edward. 1870. Flint Chips: A Guide to Pre-Historic Archaeology Illustrated by the Collection in the Blackmore Museum, Salisbury. London: Bell and Daldy. By Amara Thornton
This month's post is over on "Ure Routes", where I discuss a 1943 painting of Hadrian's Wall which is now part of the University of Reading's Art Collections. Having found two letters relating to this artwork in the Classics Department archive some months ago, I was prompted to write up the bits of research I'd done, quoting rather liberally from the letters, after seeing a recent tweet of the painting. Find out more about this work and Faith Ashford, the artist who created it, "Miss Asford's Painting". By Amara Thornton
We recently launched a new digital exhibition on "Ure Routes", an online version of our previous "Hidden Women in the Archive: Collectors, Curators and Cataloguers" exhibition. Essentially, the handlist has been replicated online, with the addition of some fabulous short films, one for each of the ten women represented in the exhibition. Late last year, a number of staff and students in the Classics Department and the Ure Museum were roped into providing voice overs for these films, bringing the artefacts and archives included in the display to life. It was thrilling for me to hear extracts from the archives read aloud, a compelling reminder of the humans behind museum collections. I hope you think so to. Explore "Hidden Women Digital" here. By Amara Thornton This month we installed a new exhibition at the Ure Museum. "Egypt in Reading" explores the colonial context of archaeology in Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The exhibition storyline focuses on the excavations conducted under the direction of British archaeologist John Garstang. He also happens to be one of five archaeologists whose lives and social networks I researched for my PhD. Garstang's work in Egypt wasn't an area I had previously researched much, however – I had focused more on his time in Sudan (1909-14). But the Ure Museum's collection of Egyptian antiquities is drawn from an earlier period in Garstang's life, when he was in his late 20s and early 30s. The exhibition storyline doesn't just concentrate on Garstang. My underlying ethos in putting the display together was to emphasise multiple perspectives and (as far as I could) present multiple 'voices', to go beyond profiling a male British director-of-dig. So you will find references to a few of the Egyptian men who worked with Garstang – particularly his chief foreman Saleh Abd El Nebi. There are also some fantastic business cards once belonging to various Egyptian dragomans – these come from Professor Rachel Mairs' personal collection. In the digital version of the exhibition you can watch her explaining three of the cards now featured in the exhibition.
You'll also find references to a few women in the display. These include artist and University College Reading alumna Henrietta Lawes, who as a volunteer with Flinders and Hilda Petrie had gone to Egypt in 1898; Garstang's wife Marie, who would become a noted (though unofficial) conservator; and Meta Williams, Secretary of the Institute of Archaeology at Liverpool who helped facilitate the acquisition of these Egyptian artefacts in the early 1920s. We could not have put this exhibition together in the way that we did without access to the archives in the Garstang Museum in Liverpool, and the help of its curator Dr Gina Criscenzo-Laycock. While the Ure Museum archive has letters relating to the acquisition of the Liverpool collection in the early 1920s, it does not have material related to the original excavation of the artefacts. That information is in Liverpool, where John Garstang was based. Gina has been incredibly generous in sharing digital images of Garstang's excavation reports, photograph albums and various ephemera relating to Garstang's exhibitions in London. Chief among these latter items is the visitors book to the 1903 and 1904 exhibitions; for a network-lover like myself, this was an absolute gold mine. Ure Museum Assistant Curator Jayne Holly and I went to Liverpool last month to find materials we could use for the display. I was looking particularly for any references to individual workmen, so I was thrilled to find among the periodic reports Garstang sent to the small Committees providing the funds for excavation his chief foreman Saleh's signature and seal. A reproduced image of this is now on display in the Ure Museum. Two other photographic highlights (reproduced for display) came from Garstang's photograph albums. The images in question show Garstang's British assistant, an artist called Harold Jones, painting portraits inside the rock-tomb site office at Beni Hasan. I knew from my PhD research that Jones's paintings were shown during the exhibitions held at the end of the season – but I never expected to see the works-in-progress! I also wanted to profile a few local (to Reading) links to Egypt. These include Caversham-born Henrietta Lawes, mentioned already. In the course of the planning of the exhibition it became clear that beyond her bequest of Egyptian antiquities to her alma mater, she also gave a number of books on Egypt. These went into the Library, and thanks to the hard work of several people in University of Reading Library and Special Collections the full list of her book bequest was found. We present one of Henrietta Lawes's books, a copy of the 5th edition Baedeker's guide to Egypt, bearing a plate acknowledging her bequest. Another important Egypt-Reading link I wanted particularly to highlight was the presence of Egyptian students at University College Reading during the time that John Garstang was working in Egypt. Over the course of my time at Reading I've been looking through various items in the University History Collection, including reports of Faculty and other administrative records. These have revealed that there were Egyptian students at the College from at least 1908. But the item on display is a copy of the University College Reading Review from autumn 1915. This notes three Egyptian alumni of the College sending a supportive address to their former colleagues and classmates, as Egypt moved from a country occupied by Britain to a British Protectorate, and war raged across Europe and the Middle East. I could say a lot more about this exhibition, which has really been a labour of love and an attempt to integrate the complex and rich history of archaeology into a museum display case, privileging archives and other historic materials as much as ancient artefacts. But I hope you will go and see it yourselves – and/or visit the exhibition website for the full handlist, lots of images, and some exciting extra content! |
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