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

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

In mid-May, a series of films were put online at the British School at Athens website.  It was the product of my collaboration with the School's staff on an exciting journey through the archives, looking for hidden histories of women at the School.  

​Rather than focus on BSA students, our collaboration centred on the lives of wives and daughters of the School's early Directors. This was inspired, in part, by the School's decision to put the diary of Emily Penrose, classical scholar and daughter of the BSA's first Director Francis Cranmer Penrose, online.

To Emily Penrose's story, told over two films (here and here), were added the stories of Mary Gardner, a writer married to the School's second Director Ernest Gardner (here), and Ellen Sophia Bosanquet, who was also a writer, married to the School's fifth Director Robert Carr Bosanquet (here).  

I published my work on Mary Gardner and Ellen Sophia Bosanquet's books in Archaeologists in Print, but it was great to be able to return to these fascinating women for this series.  

Early this month, I published a blog post on "Ure Routes" which draws on another set of records, held at the University of Reading.  These records tell the still very hidden history of minority students at the University in the early 20th century.  The evidence I found for this history was fascinating, and I'm glad to have the chance to make a bit more visible through the blog.  I only scratched the surface, but as campaigns for a more inclusive curriculum continue, I firmly believe it's imperative that these records are made more accessible for research.  Read "An Understudied History" here.

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!

By Amara Thornton

I've been adding more biographical entries to "Ure Routes" this month. It's part of my mission to ensure that even if individuals whose letters are now held in the Ure Museum aren't currently visible online, you can discover why they are significant on the Museum's research blog. Now you can learn more about three people who are represented in the Ure Museum archive:  "Vivian (Whitfield) Wade-Gery", "Caroline Amy Hutton" and "Reginald Percy Austin".

By Amara Thornton

This past month I've put three linked posts on Ure Routes relating to my continuing research in the documents in filing cabinets that comprise the Museum archives.  
 
The first post was an initial description of the main contents of the Museum archive, which included a list of archaeologists (of various nationalities) who are represented among the files.  You can read "Ure Museum Archives: An Initial Description" here. 
 
The second post contextualises one part of the archive – the notebooks and correspondence relating to excavations at Rhitsona, Greece in 1907-8.  In date-terms, this material is among the earliest in the Museum archive. You can read "From the Archive: The Road to Mykalessos" here.
 
The third post is a biographical one, providing information about one of the people who worked on site at Rhitsona during the 1907/08 excavation.  Grace Holding was a Classics Mistress at a well-known girls' school in London, but also among one of the British women involved in archaeology in Greece.  Letters from her during this period are now held in the Ure Museum archive.  
 
Although the work that Grace Holding did at Rhitsona was published, she wouldn't be considered 'notable' enough to merit inclusion on Wikipedia (an ongoing problem that extends to much more 'notable' women). So I decided to put what I was able to find together to make a Wikipedia-like biography for her on Ure Routes.  Luckily, with the help of the Ure's Assistant Curator Jayne Holly, and the extent issues of the North London Collegiate School magazine, I was able to find out a fair amount! You can read "Grace Ernestine Holding (c. 1873-1943)" here.

By Amara Thornton
​
Directing you once more this month to Ure Routes, where you can find out more about our recently launched project "Annie's Box"!  This exciting interactive is now sitting at the Ure Museum, waiting for visitors!  Find out more about "Annie's Box" here. 

By Amara Thornton

This month's blog is on Ure Routes, as last week we installed a new exhibition at the Ure Museum, "Allen Seaby's Archaeology for Children".  The genesis of the display goes back to my first few months at Reading. I met Laura Carnelos, who was then cataloguing collections in the Typography Department. She drew my attention to some material she was working on that was relevant to archaeological publishing. One of them is the archive of artist Allen Seaby.*  
 
Seaby was a Professor of Fine Art at Reading in the early 20th Century, but he also wrote books on archaeology for children.  Laura had in the course of cataloguing come across an unpublished manuscript, "Leon of Massalia", a story set in ancient Greece.  
 
Of course, this intrigued me because of the books for children I wrote about in Archaeologists in Print.  It led me to look more into Seaby's works, and the ways in which he presented archaeology and archaeological discoveries for younger readers.  A few months later, we were installing the exhibition! 

 It took on a new form at rather the last minute, with a unexpected and very generous loan of lots of relevant sketches and preliminary drawings from Allen Seaby's grandson, the artist Robert Gillmor, to whom we are extremely grateful. 
 
With installation imminent, Ure Museum curator Professor Amy Smith and I sat down and talked through Seaby's life, and the materials we had gathered on loan from Robert Gillmor, the Typography Department and the Children's Collection (part of Special Collections). The concept ended up falling rather naturally into chronological phases when mapped against Seaby's life; these became "Chapters", mimicking a book, as I drafted the handlist.  

​You can read more about Seaby at "Allen Seaby and Archaeology" and by visiting the exhibition at the Ure Museum, on until 21 February! Use the hashtag #SeabysArchaeology to tell us what you think of the display.
 
*The other is the Isotype collection.