Introduction
Cecily Margaret (Peggy) Piggott, latterly Guido, née Preston (1912–1994, first married to the prehistorian Stuart Piggott and later to Luigi Guido) was a British prehistorian and highly skilled archaeological fieldworker who made ‘a distinctive contribution to British prehistoric studies’ (The Times, 1994). A prolific excavator, researcher, and finds specialist, her career in British archaeology spanned sixty years, and was defined by strategic field techniques, and rapid, high-standard publication. Beyond her role at Sutton Hoo in 1939, she is best known for her ground-breaking approach to Bronze Age burial and agricultural landscapes, hillforts, roundhouses, crannogs, and her pioneering studies of Bronze Age and Iron Age artefacts. Here, we present her biography and bibliography (see Supplementary Material), a record of her outstanding contribution to the discipline, coupled with an analysis of women's role in post-war archaeology.
Described as ‘intelligent, kind, generous, and popular’ (Allen, Reference Allen2018), Piggott had been undeterred by the demands of rescue excavation for the military (see Pope & Davies, Reference Pope and Davies2023). With ‘inexhaustible powers of leadership and enthusiasm’ she was considered ‘a remarkable character in the field’ (The Times, 1994). Piggott published prolifically (as C.M. Piggott until 1955 and M. Guido from 1958 onwards); her work advanced the fields of Early and Middle Bronze Age burial traditions, Later Bronze Age agricultural landscapes, Late Bronze Age metalwork, especially razors, Late Bronze Age and Iron Age settlement and hillfort studies, roundhouse architecture, Iron Age ceramics, and prehistoric to early medieval glass beads 2000 bc–ad 700.
Discussion of her early life and career, her 1930s field training with the Curwens, Wheelers, Alexander Keiller, and the Bersus, her work on the Sutton Hoo excavations, and her pioneering wartime barrow excavations is published elsewhere (Pope & Davies, Reference Pope and Davies2023). The latter saw her recognized in 1944 as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, one of the mid- to late 1940s swell, celebrating women's wartime successes (Figure 1). Here we examine Piggott's post-war career, testing the conclusions of Pope (Reference Pope2011) that the gender politics of post-war Britain led to a loss of women from the discipline, with discussion of women archaeologists’ mid-twentieth-century careers.
Figure 1. Growth in women Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries (from Mahal, Reference Mahal2022: fig. 1, source data: SALON Fellows Lists). Reproduced by permission of the Beyond Notability Project.
The Prehistory of Scotland
By the age of thirty-two, Peggy Piggott had been recognized by the Society of Antiquaries of London for her ‘devotion’ to archaeology, her furtherance of prehistory in southern England through publication, and her wartime work on the Executive Committee of the Royal Archaeological Institute (Pope & Davies, Reference Pope and Davies2023). In conversation with Julia Roberts, she said she would have loved a lecturing post, but would not have qualified due to the ‘marriage bars’ of the time (Roberts, Reference Roberts2005: 209), which, owing to the influence of the Church of Scotland, were lifted only for schoolteachers in 1945 (Adams, Reference Adams, Paterson and Fewell1990). Further, limited degree options for women prehistorians in 1930 (the year she turned eighteen) had left her at a peculiar disadvantage (see Pope & Davies, Reference Pope and Davies2023). This led her to focus instead on building her husband's post-war career. Through her friendship with Austin Lane Poole (President of St John's College, Oxford) she ensured that Stuart would gain his degree, and so meet the requirements for appointment as professor at the University of Edinburgh (Mercer, Reference Mercer1998: 430).
In 1947, Peggy sent a telegram confirming Stuart's appointment to Cambridge, where he was staying with Glyn Daniel (Roberts, Reference Roberts2005: 236). The pair moved from Hampshire to Edinburgh, taking a New Town flat in Gloucester Place, Peggy supporting Stuart in his role, whilst continuing her own research (Holtam, Reference Holtam1996; Mercer, Reference Mercer1998: 432, 434; Roberts, Reference Roberts2005: 225). On arrival, Stuart was taken aback that Scottish archaeology had not kept pace with developments in excavation methodology further south, which he and Peggy planned to address by demonstrating good practice (Ritchie & Watkins, Reference Ritchie and Watkins1997: xv). With each keen to focus their efforts on Scottish prehistory, the Ministry of Works invited them to begin excavating archaeological sites. They agreed to split prehistory between them, Peggy focusing on the Bronze and Iron Ages, the aim being to elucidate a sequence for later Scottish prehistory (Mercer, Reference Mercer1998: 431; Roberts, Reference Roberts2005: 210). The Scottish Civil Service had only lifted its marriage bar the previous year (Breeze et al., Reference Breeze, Marshall and Ralston2019).
During WWII, Peggy Piggott had set a high publication standard. Across the 1940s, in her thirties, she was at the height of her productivity, averaging two published reports a year, often for the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, and, on moving to Edinburgh, the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, becoming one of the latter's most prolific contributors for that period (Ralston, Reference Ralston2023: 2698). In the later 1940s, she continued to focus on the Late Bronze Age (Supplementary Material Table S1). Turning to artefact studies, she produced five specialist metalwork reports, most notably a pioneering work on British razors, still consulted today, which considered razors to be an Early Bronze Age British development, moving against mainstream invasionist narratives (Piggott, 1946b: 124–25). She also produced reports on the Late Bronze Age burial at Orrock (Fife; Piggott, 1950b) and Blackrock hoard (Sussex; Piggott, 1949c). At this point, too, her interest in ancient glass beads began, inspired by the work of German specialist Thea Haevernick (J. Price, pers. comm., 2016). In this work on razors and beads, we see her ‘scaling up’ to national-level knowledge.
Hillforts and the Hownam Model
With Stuart in post at the University of Edinburgh, Peggy was awarded funding by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland to investigate the development sequence of Iron Age settlement in southern Scotland; a programme of research excavations, contemporary with a Council for British Archaeology policy statement edited by her husband and Christopher Hawkes (Hawkes & S. Piggott, Reference Hawkes and Piggott1948), that targeted settlement classification, testing surface typologies via excavation whilst providing field training for university students (Hawkes & S. Piggott, Reference Hawkes and Piggott1948: 10–11; Piggott, 1950a: 194). With Stuart a Commissioner of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS hereafter), this would complement field survey by the RCAHMS, building on the latter's Roxburghshire survey, which was to contribute to its Inventory (RCAHMS, 1956); the Commission's Kenneth Steer selected Hownam Rings and Hayhope Knowe for the task (S. Halliday, pers. comm., 2021). Remaining at the forefront of modern research objectives, Piggott found a place in Scottish archaeology as an academic wife, pursuing archaeology by training students, not in the classroom but in the field, as Tessa Wheeler had done in southern England almost two decades earlier (Carr, Reference Carr2012).
From winter excavations on the Wessex downland to the challenges of the Cheviot uplands, Piggott continued to prove her mettle as a fieldworker. Each of the first three Cheviots sites she excavated lay between 305 and 335 m asl. At Hownam, camping life was ‘extremely difficult’ with weather so bad that they lost one in five digging days (Piggott, 1950a: 194). One Hownam volunteer described Peggy as ‘incisive, practical, brisk in execution… the complete professional’ (Gerard, Reference Gerard1994: 31) with an outstanding capacity for manual work; singularly undeterred by the upland conditions, nor apparently by the haughty behaviour of some older male volunteers, struggling under female leadership. At Hownam, she was assisted by a wartime friend, the diplomat Glencairn Balfour Paul, who joined as a ‘holiday digger’, and Joan du Plat Taylor, Peggy's contemporary on the Wheelers’ excavations, who was by then the Institute of Archaeology librarian and a regular excavation volunteer (Balfour Paul, Reference Balfour Paul2006: 128; Allen, Reference Allen2018).
At Hownam Rings and Hayhope Knowe, Piggott was frustrated by the lack of datable objects. As a result, she selected Bonchester Hill, where Alexander Curle's previous excavations suggested potential for an assemblage that might aid chronology (S. Halliday, pers. comm., 2021). She directed Bonchester with her friend R.J.C. Atkinson, and RCAHMS's Kenneth Steer and Richard Feachem (Piggott, 1952), establishing a date for the earliest fort via chronologically diagnostic artefacts and comparison with ‘Abernethy’ forts (so named after Childe's Abernethy tradition of timber-laced forts), although again expressing frustration at the paucity of finds. The excavation campaign was a successful collaboration, then, between the RCAHMS and the universities. Piggott's plans used the RCAHMS surveys as a base, yet show Wheeler's influence, with human figures as scale; those for Hownam bearing her initials. It was also she who published, each site written up in the same year it was excavated (Figure 2). In the era before radiocarbon dating was applied to archaeological sites, it was her characteristically rapid publication of Hownam Rings (Piggott, 1950a), Hayhope Knowe (Piggott, 1951b), and Bonchester Hill (Piggott, 1952) that began to provide a framework for later prehistoric settlement in southern Scotland.
Figure 2. Site plans: Hownam Rings (Piggott, 1950a: fig. 2); Hayhope Knowe (1951b: fig. 2). Reproduced by permission of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
At Hownam, building on the work of Bill Varley in Cheshire (Varley et al. Reference Varley, Jackson and Chitty1940), Piggott confirmed a basic architectural sequence for hillforts: first, that ‘many Iron Age forts had a [Late Bronze Age] palisaded enclosure as their earliest phase’ (1950a: 221) and, second, that a univallate Iron Age enclosure generally preceded the construction of outer earthworks, added over time. The latter is clearly supported by the reorientation of Hownam's southern entrance. Attempts to develop this ‘Hownam model’ for upland settlement began only in the 1970s, in excavation of the lowland East Lothian sites of Dryburn Bridge and Broxmouth (Hill, Reference Hill and Harding1982; Armit, Reference Armit and Bevan1999: 70). Piggott would have been little surprised by this: ‘A great deal of excavation remains to be done in all parts of the country before the very significant differences can be worked out, for there were many varied kinds of defences used’ (Piggott, 1950a: 195). She understood that her 1940s work was shedding ‘a little light’ and represented ‘only the barest beginning’ (Piggott, 1950a: 220), whilst a younger generation characterized the Hownam ‘paradigm’ as a strict type-fossil. In fact, her two basic principles remain widely accepted in hillfort studies, principles now supported by the radiocarbon dating and Bayesian modelling of Eddisbury hillfort (Pope et al., Reference Pope, Mason, Hamilton, Rule and Swogger2020: tab. 1, fig. 9).
Piggott's method remained tactical and efficient, digging and publishing a site per year, with excavation strategy adapted to site objectives: a slip-trench across the Hownam earthworks, targeted open-area trenches at Hayhope, and expanded slip-trenches at Bonchester. Her most influential site in terms of field method was Hayhope, with 520 m2 open in one season, larger than Bersu's contemporary trench at Scotstarvit, Fife (Bersu, Reference Bersu1950a: 243, fig. 2). Hayhope was a first attempt to date palisaded enclosures for the RCAHMS, as well as investigate three roundhouses. Following pioneering hillfort excavation strategies by Dorothy Liddell at Hembury, Devon (1930-32, 1935; see Pope et al., Reference Pope, Mason, Hamilton, Rule and Swogger2020), the Wheelers at Maiden Castle, Dorset (1934–37; Wheeler & Cotton, Reference Wheeler and Cotton1943), and the Varleys in Cheshire (Pope et al., Reference Pope, Mason and Campbellin prep.), this was one of the first large area excavations on a settlement interior in northern Britain. Piggott's field method took and tailored the best of the Wheeler and Bersu schools, scaling them for rapid assessment and publication. Hayhope set a new standard. By her late thirties, in addition to Ram's Hill, Berkshire (Piggott & Piggott, 1940), Piggott had excavated a further seven hillforts, in just four years (Table S1). She considered the latter three Scottish sites (Castle Law, Craig's Quarry, Braidwood Fort) to be ‘minor’ investigations, undertaken for Stuart's university role. An interim publication by her, on behalf of the Edinburgh University Archaeology Society, is referenced in the final publication (S. Piggott, 1958: 66), published under Stuart's name only.
Roundhouses and Bersu
Beyond elucidating relative settlement sequences through excavation of hillfort architecture, Piggott's (1951b) reconstruction drawing of the Hayhope roundhouse (Figure 3) set the modern standard (Pope, Reference Pope2003: 11). In 1938–39, Peggy had worked with German archaeologist Gerhard Bersu at Little Woodbury, Wiltshire, and whilst the excavations successfully exposed an Early Iron Age roundhouse, the report was inconclusive in its architectural reconstruction. Consequently, Piggott drew on the work of Varley (Varley et al., Reference Varley, Jackson and Chitty1940), over that of Bersu (Bersu, Reference Bersu1940; Reference Bersu1950a). In this, she was entering into dialogue with northern prehistorians rather than importing ideas from Wessex (contra Hill, Reference Hill and Harding1982: 5). At Hayhope, she simplified the thinking on roundhouse design, in line with the 1930s Cheviot house reconstructions of Thomas Wake (Reference Wake1939) and Howard Kilbride-Jones (Reference Kilbride-Jones1938) in Northumberland (see Pope, Reference Pope2003: 8). Meanwhile, reconstructions of Bersu's big houses of the elite (see Evans, Reference Evans1998: 190), by contrast, went on to develop structural problems (Pope, Reference Pope2003: 18–19). The Hownam-Hayhope excavations also suggested the potential for a typology of roundhouses, as undertaken later in north-eastern England and the Scottish Borders by Richard Feachem and George Jobey who, along with T.C.M. Brewster at Staple Howe, Yorkshire, were all greatly influenced by Piggott (see Pope, Reference Pope, Hunter and Ralston2015).
Figure 3. House reconstructions at Scotstarvit Covert (Bersu, Reference Bersu1950a: fig. 9) and Hayhope Knowe (Piggott, 1951b: fig. 11). Reproduced by permission of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
With her close reading of the archaeology, Piggott had set the agenda for 1960s northern settlement studies. In agreement with Ralston (Reference Ralston2003: 3, 17, 19) who identifies the 1940s as a watershed moment, we see Piggott's late 1940s Cheviots work as the blossoming of modern prehistoric settlement studies, not only in her targeted excavation strategy, but also in the interpretation of hillfort and roundhouse architecture (Pope, Reference Pope2003: 11). The latter is credited to Bersu in southern England, but it seems the important element was an intellectual sparring between Piggott and Bersu. In 1953 Piggott turned her attention to wetland archaeology, and her most technically skilled work: the rescue excavation of Milton Loch crannog (Dumfries), with its preserved timber roundhouse (Figure 4). At Milton Loch, Piggott achieved the total excavation of 650 m2 in one season.
Figure 4. Milton Loch crannog, as exposed in 1953 (Piggott, 1955: fig. 7). Reproduced by permission of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
Bersu has been credited with the advent of modern area excavation in 1930s archaeology (e.g. Hill, Reference Hill2000), an important move, beyond slip-trench sections through hillfort ramparts, towards settlement interiors and the plan (Lucas, Reference Lucas2012: 215–16). Rather than an open-area excavation, Bersu used a continental strip system (see Evans, Reference Evans1989); opening nine 5 m-wide strips across two seasons at Little Woodbury (1938-39). Here, one strip was backfilled before the next was opened, with c. 622 m2 open at any one time. Beyond hillfort studies, open-area settlement excavations were thus pioneered by Cheviot excavators Wake (at Witchy Neuk, Northumberland, in 1934: 600 m2 in one season; Wake, Reference Wake1939) and Kilbride-Jones (at Milking Gap, Northumberland, in 1937: 1000 m2 in one season; Kilbride-Jones, Reference Kilbride-Jones1938) rather than Bersu in 1938 in Wiltshire. In his 1940s excavations, Bersu typically opened c. 200 m2 each season, although 350 m2 at Ballacagen Lough A (Bersu & Griffiths, Reference Bersu and Griffiths1949; Bersu, Reference Bersu1950a, Reference Bersu1950b, Reference Bersu1977). By contrast, Piggott opened 520 m2 at Hayhope and 650 m2 at Milton Loch, rejecting Bersu's Little Woodbury strip method in favour of her learning from Tessa Verney Wheeler and the Cheviot standard.
Piggott's excavation of the Milton Loch crannog was perhaps a response to Bersu's 1941–44 Isle of Man excavations and his problematic interpretation of massive houses (published as Bersu, Reference Bersu1977, long after his death; see Pope, Reference Pope2003: 9–10). Instead, Piggott established similarities between dryland and wetland architecture (Pope, Reference Pope2003: 12). The achievements of Little Woodbury were certainly not improved upon by Bersu's later work (Evans, Reference Evans1998; Pope, Reference Pope2003: 10), and it is justifiable to wonder whether the Little Woodbury team, including Piggott, were instrumental in the successes of that site. In the 1940s, Bersu was selecting sites to find the ‘big houses’ of Hawkes’ migrating elite (Evans, Reference Evans1998: 195), whereas Piggott was suggesting local invention and continuity. This perspective had its origins in her early ceramics training with E.C. Curwen, contact with the ideas of Maud Cunnington (Reference Cunnington1923, Reference Cunnington1932), and her familiarity with Varley's Late Bronze Age dating of palisaded enclosures (Varley et al. Reference Varley, Jackson and Chitty1940).
Peggy Piggott's Thinking
Piggott's thinking has been characterized, erroneously, as synonymous with that of her husband. Consequently, she has been charged with importing into the north Hawkes’ (Reference Hawkes1931) invasionist model, which ascribes cultural change in the British Iron Age to migration (Hill, Reference Hill and Harding1982: 5). This stems from later archaeologists not seeking to evaluate Piggott's thinking in its own right. Like Bersu, Stuart Piggott was a supporter and exponent of the Hawkesian model (S. Piggott, Reference Piggott1949: 153; Reference Piggott and Rivet1966), which in turn followed the inter-war thinking of Wheeler (Reference Wheeler1921). The result was that Edinburgh, even under Dennis Harding, its Abercromby professor of archaeology between 1977 and 2007, retained Hawkesian thinking long after its critique. By 1952, Kenyon, following early exponents Cunnington and Childe, instead advocated for defining ‘regional characteristics’ from the archaeological evidence, having recognised that Hawkes’ historicist scheme did not fit the ceramics (Cunliffe, Reference Cunliffe1991: 13–15; Prtak, Reference Prtak2019: 58–60; Pope, Reference Pope2022: 5). By the time an edited collection of essays on Iron Age northern Britain was published (Rivet, Reference Rivet1966), a younger generation of archaeologists were more in line with Piggott's 1940s thinking. Hodson (Reference Hodson1964) was focusing on the material differences between Britain and continental Europe, and Clark (Reference Clark1966) dealt the final blow against invasionism, whilst Stuart Piggott attempted a slightly awkward scheme for Scotland (S. Piggott, Reference Clark1966).
Assessing Piggott in her own right, we find her 1940s thinking, alongside that of other London Institute fieldworkers, such as Kenyon, looking ahead, whereas her husband and Bersu looked backwards to Hawkes. Peggy had begun moving against attributing change to migration by the early 1940s: suggesting ‘local invention’ over invasion; qualifying ‘invading’ with ‘or peacefully settling’ (Piggott, 1950a: 195); noting evolution in ceramics from local Late Bronze Age forms; thinking about change in architecture as ‘fashion’ rather than invasion; and seeing Late Bronze Age razors as of potentially Early Bronze Age development (Piggott, 1942: 16; 1946b: 124, 126). She openly critiqued Stuart's thinking in her Hownam report; whilst change at Bonchester was attributed to ‘political refugees’ from the south (Piggott, 1950a: 221; 1952: 132).
Rather than invasionism, Piggott's 1940s thinking is more in line with Childe's (Reference Childe1935) ideas on diffusionism, leading her to propose late dates for Hayhope and Bonchester (first centuries bc–ad), despite a nod to Cunnington (Reference Cunnington1932) and Varley's (Varley et al. Reference Varley, Jackson and Chitty1940) recognition of Bronze Age cultural continuity. Piggott's thinking was transitional, marking a step beyond invasionism, towards what would become the mood of the 1960s, when Clark (Reference Clark1966) and Clarke (Reference Clarke1968) overtly rejected change in material culture as a marker of population movement. Unlike her more historically minded husband, the latter arguably holding back post-war Scottish archaeology, Peggy Piggott's thinking was tied more to the archaeology she encountered and the work of northern British prehistorians: Kilbride-Jones, Wake, Varley, and, of course, Childe.
It is this period of Piggott's career, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, which identifies her as among the most important twentieth-century British prehistorians. Three years after moving to Edinburgh, she had excavated three Scottish hillforts and their roundhouses, in addition to her earlier work on prehistoric ceramics, Early-Middle Bronze Age barrows and cremations, and Later Bronze Age agricultural landscapes (Pope & Davies, Reference Pope and Davies2023). In her Hownam report, she discussed archaeological survival, recognizing for the first time the problems of erosion on slopes, and, like Curwen and Bersu, the vestigial nature of timber features. It was this keen reflection on formation processes that was to set the tone for 1960s and 1970s northern British prehistory; with Piggott's influence on the later settlement studies of Kenneth Steer, George Jobey, and Richard Feachem clear (Pope, Reference Pope2003: 12–16).
In her work at Hownam, Hayhope, and Milton Loch, we see the development of modern settlement archaeology, in particular regarding targeted area-excavation strategies, the development of hillfort architecture, the architectural reconstruction of roundhouses, consideration of archaeological survival, and, perhaps most importantly, an interest in autochthonous social change. By 1953, at Milton Loch, Piggott was working towards what we would now consider an understanding of ‘everyday life’ in prehistory: locating the positions of finds on plans, considering use of space, and documenting acts of ritual deposition.
Piggott was not only a supremely capable fieldworker, but working at an intellectual scale that should have suggested her as academic successor to Wheeler and Hawkes, had her lack of degree and status as a married woman not barred her from appointment (Hawkes, Reference Hawkes1982: 320–23). A lack of professional recognition for Piggott in the 1950s worked ultimately to hold back progress in British Iron Age studies (Pope, Reference Pope2022: 5).
Peggy and Stuart Piggott: Leaving 1950s Britain
In the early 1950s, having already excavated four hillforts, Piggott worked on a further three with her husband: Castle Law (Piggott & Piggott, 1954a) and Braidwood Fort (S. Piggott, 1960), both in Midlothian, and Craig's Quarry, East Lothian (Piggott & Piggott, 1954a, 1960) (see Table S1), again with Wheeler-style illustrations. The two had been joint excavation directors on a number of sites, and their long-term intellectual exchange and partnership in excavation had benefited Stuart's academic role. It was a partnership, she arguably the more technical excavator and publisher, he the European academic. In the preface to his Neolithic Cultures (Reference Piggott1954), Stuart thanks Peggy for her penetrating critique of the work. Alongside illustrating the latter, their Scottish fieldwork at Braidwood Fort, and hers at Milton Loch, she had also published a series of English sites, including the hilltop site of Carl Wark (near Sheffield; Piggott, 1951a), the Dorchester-on-Thames Neolithic complex (Oxfordshire) with old friends R.J.C. Atkinson and Nancy Sandars—important for its work on henges (Atkinson et al., 1951)—and her wartime excavation of an Iron Age barrow on Beaulieu Heath (Hampshire) (Piggott, 1953). After seven years in Edinburgh, Peggy seemingly wanted to move on.
In 1954, as Rik Wheeler was voted BBC TV personality of the year, Piggott produced her penultimate report for Scottish prehistory: a note on the ceramics in the Erskine Beveridge collection from two duns on Tiree (Piggott, 1954b). By this time, her marriage had broken down (Mercer, Reference Mercer1998: 434; A. Collett-White, pers. comm., 2021) and, in 1955, Stuart turned down Wheeler's offer of the directorship of the London Institute, a move south that Peggy might have welcomed. Neither Peggy nor Kathleen Kenyon were considered for the position, despite the latter having been Acting Director from 1942 to 1946 (Meheux, Reference Meheux2018). In the end, the post went to W.F. Grimes, who had crouched to watch Peggy excavate at Sutton Hoo, had illustrated the Bledlow assemblage for her in 1944, and had a less impressive publication record, compared even to his wife Audrey Williams, yet had been awarded a CBE that year. Between personal unhappiness and professional unfulfillment, 1950s Britain may have become too much to tolerate.
Peggy worked with Stuart at Braidwood Fort until 1955. In 1956, the year her younger sister Pamela died, came the annulment of their twenty-year marriage (Allen, Reference Allen2018). This was granted on grounds of non-consummation, perhaps agreed between the two to protect her inheritance, although confirmed by her in later life (M. Hegener, pers. comm., 2021). Regardless, by all accounts both were heartbroken (McArdle & McArdle, Reference McArdle and McArdle2021). For Peggy, the ‘marriage bar’ seems to have been doubly unfair as, whilst married, her career was never formalized by an institution, yet getting un-married was also detrimental. Both Harding (Reference Harding1996a) and Mercer (Reference Mercer1996) wrote Peggy out of Stuart's first obituaries, despite them having been friendly in later life (see Holtam, Reference Holtam1996; seeing her included in Harding, Reference Harding1996b). By the 1990s, the authors of this article, as undergraduates at the Universities of Durham and Edinburgh, heard of ‘Mrs Piggott’ only in passing. Following the annulment of her marriage, Peggy briefly reverted to her maiden name, for the 1957 translation she and Luigi Guido, a Sicilian accountant, made of Bernabò Brea's Sicily Before the Greeks (Balfour Paul, Reference Balfour Paul2006: 128; Jackson, Reference Jackson2014; Allen, Reference Allen2018). Peggy married Guido in Chelsea, close to her mother's home, on 26 June 1957, in the presence of old London friends Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop (née Clay) and Joan du Plat Taylor (General Register Office, 1957: the marriage certificate notes ‘spinster’, confirming the annulment of her first marriage) and the pair moved to Sicily.
Italian Archaeology and Glass Beads, 1960s–1970s
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Peggy Guido produced four popular guidebooks on Italian archaeology, published by Thames & Hudson and Faber & Faber in their popular series on global archaeology: part of the post-war move towards public education. She wrote books on the archaeology of Syracuse (Guido, 1958) and Sardinia (Guido, 1963), and founded the Faber Archaeological Guides, edited by Glyn Daniel, with her Sicily volume (Guido, 1967), following it with southern Italy as a whole (Guido, 1972; Ridgway, Reference Ridgway1973) (Figure 5). She also wrote reviews of notable Italian archaeological works for a British audience in the pages of Antiquity (e.g. Guido, 1964, 1970). Her friends reported happy memories of travelling with Guido, and her ‘encyclopaedic’ knowledge of little-known sites (The Times, 1994). By 1965, the Guidos had a flat in Elm Park Gardens (Allen, Reference Allen2018), fifteen minutes from Peggy's mother. The latter died in 1964, and it may be that Peggy had taken on a caring role. In 1965 she took part in a BBC documentary on Sutton Hoo, in which she made clear that archaeology is not about finding treasure, but building information on chronology (BBC, 1965).
Figure 5. Peggy Guido's Italian archaeology guidebooks.
The Guidos lived in Italy for roughly fifteen years, into the 1970s, before moving to Britain together to live in Brock Street, Bath. Guido returned to her long-held research interest in glass beads, travelling Britain to visit examples on excavations and in museums (J. Price, pers. comm., 2016). She published a note in Antiquity in 1974 on the radiocarbon dating of Milton Loch, putting the site's earliest phase in the fifth century bc, and thanking Stuart Piggott for obtaining the sample. Sadly, by the mid-1970s, Luigi developed severe mysophobia and spent six months confined to his bed being cared for round-the-clock by Peggy, who wrote to his family saying how difficult the situation was. At the end of this period, after twenty years of marriage, Luigi left his wife and returned to Sicily. She never heard from him again, despite writing to him with affection, and ultimately the marriage was dissolved (A. Collett-White, pers. comm., 2021).
Stemming from her early archaeological work, Guido retained a particular fondness for the downland of Wiltshire and Dorset. In 1977, at the age of sixty-five and following Luigi's departure, she left Bath and moved to a large sixteenth-century house in Devizes: 43–44, Long Street, next-door to Devizes Museum, now Wiltshire Museum (The Times, 1994; Balfour Paul, Reference Balfour Paul2006: 128; Allen, Reference Allen2018). She immediately became active in museum affairs and the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society (Figure 6), who ran the museum, publishing a note on an Iron Age burial from Battlesbury in that year's newsletter (Guido, 1977). This move marked a watershed: finally free of caring responsibilities, she began pulling together three decades of research into ancient glass beads.
Figure 6. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society outing to the President's Farm, Calstone, Calne Without, Wiltshire, 1977, with President Mr Bonner Sykes, Librarian Mr Sandell, Mrs Guido and Mrs Sykes. © Wiltshire Museum.
Her first glass beads volume (Figure 7) was published in 1978—arguably her second pioneering work in British artefact studies after the Bronze Age razor research. Covering both prehistoric and Roman periods, it was dedicated to the memory of Tessa Verney Wheeler. With the first volume completed, she immediately commenced work on the later, historic period volume (published posthumously by Martin Welch in 1999). Both volumes remain primary reference works. From the 1970s onwards, she produced a stream of specialist glass bead reports (see Supplementary Material). Her bead research took her across Europe in a campervan in the 1980s, often accompanied by friend and neighbour, Devizes poet Eve Machin (J. Price, pers. comm., 2016; Allen, Reference Allen2018). It is testimony to her productivity in retirement that several reports were published posthumously.
Figure 7. Guido (1978) and (1999): Forty years’ research on ancient glass beads.
At the age of seventy, Guido briefly returned to Wiltshire field archaeology, publishing a reconsideration of the Figsbury Rings inner enclosure with Isobel Smith (Guido & Smith, 1982), and conducting a fieldwalking survey of Longbridge Deverill Cow Down with Eve Machin in 1982–83, to assess plough damage (Chadwick Hawkes et al., Reference Chadwick Hawkes, Hawkes and Brown2012: 15), with a brief, unpublished report produced on a small assemblage of collected surface artefacts. Guido retired from fieldwork as she entered her seventies, but she remained active in the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, and was elected Vice-President in 1984 (Mercer, Reference Mercer1998: 440). In 1981, she co-founded the Bead Study Trust and the Peggy Guido Fund for beads research, and in 1984 she established the Margaret Guido Charitable Trust, via Coutts of the Strand, to redistribute the Preston family wealth via grants to arts charities and voluntary bodies. In 1987, Stuart Piggott joined Guido in shared tenure as President of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, an office they each held until death.
Retirement
In retirement, Guido cared for Classical archaeologist, Professor Arnold W. Lawrence, youngest brother of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), a domestic and scholarly arrangement that made her very happy (The Times, 1991) (Figure 8). They first met in 1936, on his visit to Keiller's Avebury excavations, and the Lawrences often stayed in Devizes. Following Barbara Lawrence's death in 1986, Guido saw Arnold as ‘an old friend waiting to die’, so in 1987 she collected him and ‘installed him’ in her house. Lawrence bought a car, and the pair toured sites—occasionally accompanied by writer Michiel Hegener, who stayed with them several times between 1988 and 1994. Hegener witnessed Guido ‘jumping over trenches’ in August 1987 at a University of Cardiff roundbarrow excavation near Avebury (Hegener, Reference Hegener1992: 9; Allen, 2018; M. Hegener, pers. comm., 2021). Guido reportedly told the diggers that the world's greatest expert on Herodotus was sitting in the car, whilst characteristically failing to mention that she was the same on barrows. Lawrence and Guido lived happily together until his death on 31 March 1991, at the age of ninety (The Times, 1991; Chippendale, Reference Chippendale1994: 690–91; J. Price, pers. comm., 2016; Allen, Reference Allen2018). In the final years of her life, Guido's ‘compassionate concern’ also turned to Stuart, whose health was failing, and she visited him regularly in West Challow (Berkshire, now Oxfordshire) (Holtam, Reference Holtam1996; Mercer, Reference Mercer1996).
Figure 8. Left: Peggy Guido, Devizes, 8 August 1990; right: at home with A.W. Lawrence, Devizes, 1 February 1991. Left: © Wiltshire Museum; right: © Michiel Hegener.
Peggy Guido died on 8 August 1994, aged eighty-two, in hospital in Bath, leaving an estate of £600,000. Stuart survived her by two years. Her elder sister Gabrielle died the same year, in a care home ten miles from Devizes (Allen, Reference Allen2018), suggesting the two had remained close. For her family, Guido left £80,000 to her niece Susan, and £2000 each to The Camphill Village Trust for children with learning disabilities—in memory perhaps of her sister Pamela (Allen, Reference Allen2018)—to the Quakers, and to the now Royal Trinity Hospital (Allen, Reference Allen2018). The Margaret Guido Charitable Trust benefited from the residue of her estate, and in 2016 retained securities of over £600,000 (Allen, Reference Allen2018).
For archaeology, Guido made a £60,000 bequest to the National Trust's Avebury Appeal, perhaps in memory of Lawrence, helping to acquire the meadowland surrounding Silbury Hill—a fitting tribute to a woman who had done so much to enhance our understanding of British prehistory. Guido also left £20,000 to found a Bead Study Trust scholarship. To the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, Guido left her house, adjacent to Wiltshire Museum, and her excavation archive (Allen, Reference Allen2018). With this, and her presidency of the society in mind, it is disappointing that the museum gives space to Stuart's memory yet little to hers. Guido's research papers were left to the Society of Antiquaries of London, her bead notes and card indexes to glass specialist Julian Henderson (J. Price, pers. comm., 2016; Allen, Reference Allen2018).
Guido inspired affection. She is remembered for her ‘great sense of humour, a lightness of touch, her enthusiasm, and how encouraging and supportive she could be’ (J. Henderson, pers. comm., 2021). Her obituary noted a ‘generous sense of responsibility towards anyone whether young or old, needing encouragement or help’ (The Times, 1994), as evident in the final photograph of Guido with Michiel Hegener, who described her as ‘a great person’ (M. Hegener, pers. comm., 2021) yet modest (Figure 9). We find in Guido a continuation of the qualities she had admired in Tessa Verney Wheeler, another founding character of the twentieth-century discipline not widely recognized as such until the advent of feminist scholarship (Carr, Reference Carr2012). Having undertaken research on Guido since 2008, we developed her Wikipedia page (Pope & Davies, Reference Pope and Davies2016) in advance of the Trowelblazers’ Raising Horizons project (Wragg Sykes, Reference Wragg Sykes2016). Our aim has been to rebalance the record and give Guido her rightful place as one of the pioneers of British prehistory.
Figure 9. Michiel Hegener and Peggy Guido outside the Keiller Museum near Avebury, 9 May 1994. © Michiel Hegener.
Discussion: Archaeology and Women in 1930s Britain
Guido's career highlights two distinct eras in women's access to archaeology. In the 1930s, neither degree nor professional post were required, and a relatively new discipline benefited from the labour of wealthy women (Roberts, Reference Roberts2005; Carr, Reference Carr2012; Prtak, Reference Prtak2019). Subsequently, women's wartime successes led to a ‘window of recognition’ in 1946–48 amidst post-war expansion, and a few older, upper- or upper middle- class women benefited. Some gained lectureships: Aileen Fox (Exeter, 1947), Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop and Kathleen Kenyon (London, 1946 and 1948). In 1948, Cambridge finally allowed women their degrees, allowing Professor Dorothy Garrod to matriculate that year. Meanwhile, a backlash against women's professional advancement was underway.
After the war, disciplines sought to ‘professionalize’—a gendered process that pivoted from access for upper-class women to a privileging of educated, middle-class men. In archaeology, alongside the few women's lectureships, an ‘over-appointing’ of younger, middle-class men is evident, with senior posts to Hawkes (Oxford professorship, 1946), Piggott (Edinburgh chair, 1947), and Grimes (London professorship, 1956). Like Wheeler before them, these middle-class men progressed rapidly, with a high-achieving, often higher-status, inter-war wife as part of the package (Jacquetta Hawkes, Peggy Piggott, and Audrey Williams, respectively). This archaeological ‘package’, however, left those equally accomplished wives with no formal ‘professional’ standing. So, when Guido left her marriage in the mid-1950s, she also left British archaeology.
In 1948, educationist John Newsom moved against the principle of equal education for girls, and women's access to higher education subsequently flatlined at one in four until the late 1960s (Dyhouse, Reference Dyhouse2006: 35). Marriage bars were reinstated, and married women's employment, beyond teaching, became controversial, as heterosexual women were encouraged to prioritize motherhood (McDermid, Reference McDermid and Purvis1995: 123–24; Dyhouse, Reference Dyhouse2006: 57, 81; Pope, Reference Pope2011: 69, 74; Knox, Reference Knox2021). Thus, several factors worked to frustrate Guido's post-war career. First, a prehistory degree was unavailable to English women until the late 1940s. After WWII, Peggy continued producing excellent work, but, without a degree, she remained dependent on her marriage, which ironically also barred her out. As post-war society closed back down, younger women gained access via husbands and patrons, e.g. Molly Cotton, Kitty Richardson, and Leslie McNair Scott's association with Wheeler and London, or Veronica Seton-Williams’ association with Garstang and Liverpool (Seton-Williams, Reference Seton-Williams1988). An alternative was the independent status of Nancy Sandars, another prehistorian without a degree (until 1952), a well-respected scholar of independent means who worked alongside Stuart Piggott (Hughes-Brook, Reference Hughes-Brook2020), or Joan du Plat Taylor who, despite having worked as a Commissioner in Cyprus, without a degree in post-war Britain, became the London Institute's librarian.
Guido had developed the discipline. Her field method, as applied to barrows in the 1930s and 1940s, had influenced the southern English field, and her work on hillforts and houses in the 1940s and 1950s influenced northern prehistory in the 1960s and 1970s. Her early 1940s search for explanation beyond invasionism predated a disciplinary shift towards regional studies, spearheaded by Kenyon (Reference Kenyon1952) and a new generation's final critique of invasionism (Hodson, Reference Hodson1964; Rivet, Reference Rivet1966; Clark, Reference Clark1966; Clarke, Reference Clarke1968). Yet the London post, for which she was so ideally suited, went to W.F. Grimes—ironically, much to Wheeler's disappointment (Hawkes, Reference Hawkes1982). The cumulative impact of gendered education, caring responsibilities, positive discrimination in favour of men, and the marriage bar blocked women from senior roles, leaving many leading 1930s women archaeologists, who had entered the field with such promise, unable to progress. This was the context for Peggy Guido's post-war career.
Acknowledgements
Thanks first to Ian Ralston, for sparking and supporting our interest. Grateful thanks also to Peggy Guido's friends: the late Jenny Price, Julian Henderson, Michiel Hegener, and Ann Collett-White, daughter of Glencairn Balfour Paul, for personal recollections and clarifications in understanding. Thanks to Strat Halliday for robust debate about the RCAHMS role and perspective at Hownam, and to Becky Wragg Sykes and the TrowelBlazers team for their Raising Horizons project, which gave us the spur to pull our research together and place it on Wikipedia in 2016. Posthumous thanks to Peggy herself for being an excellent role model, even though we had to excavate to find her.
Supplementary Material
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/eaa.2024.13.
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