Digging for Hampshire - women were among the pioneering archaeologists

ONE of the most popular archaeology programmes on television these days is Digging for Britai’, hosted by Professor Alice Roberts.  Now into its eleventh series, the show has featured a number of established Hampshire sites, including Silchester and Basing House, as well as the new discoveries of Saxon burials in Sun Lane, Alresford.

The HFC project Celebrating Hampshire Historians has also put Hampshire archaeology firmly on the map and, moreover, has demonstrated some of the pioneering women who grasped opportunities available in these formative days.

One of these is Selina Heathcote (1814 – 1901).  In the 19th century, archaeological excavation was mostly the preserve of clerics or landed gentry.  Selina comes in the latter category, for as Miss Selina Shirley of Eatington Hall, Warwickshire, she recorded in her diary (6 April 1841) that she ‘walked in the Garden with Sir William & promised to become his Wife’.

 This was a second union for Heathcote, whose first wife, Caroline, had died in 1835, after bearing him four children.  For Lady Selina it was the beginning of a forty-year association with Hursley Park, during the early stages of which she would present Sir William with a further four sons and four daughters and through all of which she would be an integral part of this influential estate.

Sir William died in 1881 and soon after this the Dowager Lady Heathcote, assisted by Captain John Thorp, a retired Indian Army officer who had recently discovered the celebrated Brading Roman villa on the Isle of Wight, began to search the Bronze Age barrows on Cranbury Common. 

They noted that all had been opened in the centre, but ‘scarcely touched on the sides’.  They unearthed four or five inverted urns of ‘unbaked clay’, with the exception of one ‘which was of a finer material, red, and like a modern flower-pot in shape’. Some of the urns went to the Hartley Museum, Southampton.

What inspired Selina Heathcote, in her sixties, to investigate local sites in this way is far from clear.  The most likely cause was the widespread investigation of Bronze Age barrows taking place across the county at the time. 

Another stalwart archaeologist was Dorothy Liddell (1890-1938), was one of six children born to John Liddell and his wife Emily, of Benwell, Northumberland.  In 1904 the family moved to Sydmonton Court near Newbury and four years later to Sherfield Manor near Basingstoke.  During WWI the house was a hospital for the wounded and Liddell was a nurse there.  Following the death of her brother Aidan in August 1915 (he received the Victoria Cross) she joined the Red Cross in Belgium and was given an MBE for her war service.

Dorothy was unable to obtain academic tuition in archaeology but worked from 1925-29 at Avebury with Alexander Keiller, who was married to her sister.  Following this apprenticeship, she was invited by the Hampshire Field Club to excavate at Chilworth Ring, Southampton, Lodge Farm Roman Villa, North Warnborough, Meon Hill near Stockbridge, and Choseley Farm, near Odiham. 

Liddell was also engaged by the Devon Archaeological Society at Hembury hillfort, where she was mentor to 17-year-old Mary Nicol, later to become Mary Leakey, famous for her discoveries in Olduvai Gorge.

Dorothy Liddell (Image: Contributed)

Liddell’s Hampshire work yielded mixed results.  The gravel soils at Chilworth produced few finds - and many blisters - for the Taunton’s School pupils who were her workforce.  Meon Hill, on the other hand, was an Iron Age enclosure with an early medieval execution cemetery lining the ditch. 

She presumably found Lodge Farm the most rewarding and many of her finds are on show in the Willis Museum, Basingstoke.  Dorothy became ill during the work at Choseley Farm and died aged 47.  She is buried, with her parents and brother, near to the Holy Ghost Chapel, Basingstoke.

Mary Aylwin Marshall (1902-1984) was born on the Isle of Man to Robert Marshall, a doctor and his wife Anna.  She was one of the first students to qualify at the London School of Medicine for Women.  In 1928, however, having married Thomas Cotton, a Canadian cardiologist, she retired from medicine and turned to archaeology.

In 1934, as Molly Cotton she worked at Maiden Castle, Dorset, with Tessa and the first TV archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler and then, having achieved a postgraduate diploma at the London Institute of Archaeology, undertook her own excavations at Calleva Atrebatum, the Roman town at Silchester.

Outstanding work in the Foreign Office during WWII earned her an OBE and after the was she became Field Director at Clausentum, the Roman site at Bitterne, Southampton.  Her work there was soon published, with the finds (from this still rather enigmatic site) deposited with Southampton Museum.

From the 1960s onwards, Cotton turned her attentions to Italy and following the death of her husband moved to Rome, becoming closely involved with the British School for Archaeology.  

Peggy Piggott/Margaret Guido (1912 – 1994) was born Cecily Margaret Preston in Beckenham, Kent, to Elsie Fidgeon and Arthur Preston, a wealthy ironmaster.  When Peggy was eight her father drowned in Cornwall and after her mother remarried, she was brought up by an aunt.

Peggy Preston began her archaeology career digging with the Wheelers at Verulamium.  She studied at Cambridge and the Institute of Archaeology, where she met a Hampshire man, Stuart Piggott.  They married in November 1936 and made their home in Rockbourne, near Fordingbridge. 

The following year ‘Mrs Stuart Piggott’ excavated a Bronze Age barrow and urnfield at Latch Farm near Christchurch (then in Hampshire) which was speedily published.  She then worked on a variety of prestigious sites, including the Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo, before excavating a number of barrows threatened by wartime preparations in the New Forest.

Peggy Piggott (Image: Contributed)

At 27, Peggy Piggott had become a skilled excavator; it’s a crying shame, therefore, that she is depicted as naïve and inexperienced in the 2021 film The Dig, about the Sutton Hoo discovery. In real life she moved to Scotland when her husband became a professor at Edinburgh University and then spent some time in Italy after their divorce before returning to Britain as Margaret Guido, an expert on ancient beads.

These brief biographies show how privilege was an important factor in being able to forge an early archaeological career.  Selina Heathcote, owner of a substantial estate and an enquiring mind, was fairly exceptional (for a woman) in taking such an interest in the subject and the early 20th century women belonged to an era where they had to work hard to achieve recognition. 

Private means, and/or guidance from Keiller, or the Wheelers, saw them on their way and all made brilliant contributions to the subject, often employing female assistants on their digs.

And this is not the full picture.  The 2024 edition of Hampshire Studies, the Field Club’s annual publication, will contain the story of Elizabeth Barlow (1758–1852) an even earlier trailblazer from the east of the county, who delighted in ‘Digging for Hampshire’.

These cameos are part of the HFC Celebrating Hampshire Historians project, accessible at: hantsfieldclub.org.uk/ihr100/index.html, which covers more than 200 historians and archaeologists. 

This article is one of the series on CHH being published over the coming months (Chronicle, June 13).