Collection Highlights

Here colleagues and collaborators present their personal views on some favourite ADS resources

An archive from the archives

Ray Moore

Ray Moore,
ADS Curatorial Officer




The Henry MJ Underhill Archive, from Oxford University's Institute of Archaeology is a collection of magic lanternslides that were used to illustrate a series of unpublished lectures given by Henry Underhill between 1895 and 1907. What these pictures implicitly illustrate is the nature of the archaeological eye during the late nineteenth century, a time when the discipline was making its first tentative steps from an antiquarian pastime to an academic subject in its own right. Yet, Underhill's intellectual development seems to run somewhat contrary to the development of the archaeological discipline, after an interest in the natural sciences his attention was switched to ethnography and folklore, but it was this same mix of science and art that formed the foundation the discipline.

The slides implicitly testify to wider changes in the approach to antiquity at this time, showing many of the core techniques that form the key elements of modern representation of the past. Here are the maps with cardinal directions, the plans with appropriate scale, all conceived with the objective eye. This apparent tension between objective and subjective is reiterated by Underhill's use of the latest cutting edge technology, photography, to depict some of the oldest remains in the country. As if to augment this scientism the slides are largely devoid of people; yet at the same time the human presence itself is pervasive - buildings, the ploughing, the telegraph wire etc. - all representative of ongoing human endeavour. Also evident is an inherent tension between the past and present. Perhaps because they are devoid of human figures, the slides prescribe a somewhat mythological status to the remains they illustrate, as if they somehow spontaneously appeared, harking back to the disciplines origin, and Underhill's original interest, in folklore. There is also a place within the collection for that standard of modern archaeological discourse, the reconstruction photograph, or as Underhill calls it a 'restoration'. Also apparent within the working photographs, which are the basis for the hand-painted lanternslides and included in the collection, is the rehearsed and somewhat manicured composition that is characteristic of modern archaeology. If one thing is learnt from these slides it is that while archaeology continues to develop with the addition of new technologies and methodologies, the same essential themes are ever present.

The archive interface is uncomplicated and uncluttered, comprising a list of thumbnails arranged in discrete subject groupings that reflect the lectures, and it is nice to see that the authors have made the content rather than the technology the central theme of the deposit.

THE UNDERHILL ARCHIVE: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?underhill_na_2004.

The Palaeolithic in the 21st Century

Tim Evans

Tim Evans,
ADS Curatorial Officer




While an undergraduate at the very end of the last century, a generous friend gave me a second-hand copy of John Wymer's 1968 classic 'The Lower Palaeolithic Archaeology of Britain'. The volume with its abundance of catalogues, drawings and photographs was, and still is a much-loved companion. Within a few years I had gained the resources to purchase (albeit again second hand!) Wymer's seminal 1999 work 'The Lower Palaeolithic Occupation of Britain', the key reference work in Palaeolithic studies in the UK. Fast-forward a few years and I find myself looking at some more of Wymer's drawings, this time on a computer screen courtesy of one of the more recent additions to the ADS collections, the J.J. Wymer archive.

John Wymer

This forms the first part of a project commissioned by English Heritage through the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund (ALSF) to secure the survival of Wymer's personal archive. As part of the development of the archive, and in order to disseminate to public and professional audiences the full benefits of knowledge gained through past work in advance of aggregates extraction, John Wymer's Field Note Books (spanning 1949-2004) have been digitised and presented via the ADS website. The ADS interface presents the eight volumes in an 'e-book' fashion, allowing the user to flick through as if they were reading the real thing at their desk at home. In addition, and because the text on each page has been recorded in an accompanying database, the user can enter their own search terms to look for a particular site, artefact or even person.

The notebooks themselves contain a mixture of hand-written notes, drawings, and photographs, with the photographs in particular providing a unique personal touch (look out for early photos of famous archaeologists!). I'm sure it will be of great use to scholars of early prehistory or just those with an interest in the working methods of one of the most important British archaeologists of recent years. Users may like to note that the second part of the archive project - encompassing Wymer's card index, the basis of the English Rivers Palaeolithic Project (TERPS) - will be released as a digital archive via the ADS later this summer.

However, don't stop there! If you follow the link at the top of the page you'll navigate to the homepage of all the Aggregates Levy archives held by the ADS (an unlucky 111 at the time of writing!). Because of the intrinsic quaternary nature of river gravels there is a substantial number of Palaeolithic based archives contained within. All of these, unsurprisingly, build on and look to enhance Wymer's work by creating a research and management strategy for the Palaeolithic resource in Southern Britain. My favourites from this category include: the Palaeolithic Rivers of Southwest Britain or PRoSWEB project and the Palaeolithic Archaeology of the Sussex/Hampshire Coastal Corridor.

Handaxe from Broom - Dorset and Devon (from the PRoSWEB archive)

The former synthesises the archaeological evidence for the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic occupation of Southwest Britain and encompassed desktop resource assessment and geoarchaeological fieldwork. The digital archive contains a small library of reports and technical appendices detailing fieldwork such as environmental sampling and scientific dating, an image gallery. It also contains a database of find spots and museum collections that combines data derived from the Southern Rivers Palaeolithic Project (the pre-cursor to TERPS) with new find spots identified through this project. The latter project sought to identify and characterise the Palaeolithic archaeology in the study area through the creation of a GIS. The project archive contains this GIS as well as a lengthy report that helped define the differing Palaeolithic archaeological potential for the study region and similar to PRoSWEB, builds on recent and ongoing projects (such as the SRPP) in order to increase our collective knowledge. Although these two projects may not immediately stand out as important, when viewed together - and with the other ALSF Palaeolithic archives - they form a significant corpus of information for the period and an important resource for industry and researchers.

When viewed alongside Wymer's notebooks, they also highlight how archaeology in the UK has fundamentally changed over the last 60 years; from the black and white photos of field visits and pre-health and safety excavations to the more recent commercially led climate of hardhats, management plans and GIS. However, I'm glad to say that all archives can sit side by side, and are accessible at the click of a button.

THE J.J. WYMER ARCHIVE: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?wymer_eh_2008.

THE PRoSWEB ARCHIVE: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?proswb_eh_2007.

PALAEOLITHIC ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE SUSSEX/HAMPSHIRE COASTAL CORRIDOR: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?pashcc_eh_2007.

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