Peggy Piggott and post-war British archaeology
In the 2021 Netflix film The Dig, Peggy Piggott was portrayed as a young woman of moderate skill, very much stumbling into archaeology. A media storm ensued, as many archaeologists were dismayed at the poor writing around one of greatest British prehistorians. The authors here had been researching Peggy for some time and set about correcting the record.
Peggy Piggott joined British Archaeology in 1930 at the age of 18. Her career provides a perfect case study on understanding the opening up and closing down of women’s access to archaeology in the early to mid-20th century. In a previous paper on Peggy’s early life and career, we revealed how the coming together of Victorian women’s activism, socialist ideals within the British education system (London, Wales, Scotland) and WWII opened windows of opportunity for wealthy women.
In this second paper, on Peggy’s later life, we discover how post-war domestic politics worked to board up those 1930s windows. Instead, by the mid-late 1940s middle-class men returning from military service gained rapid promotion in British archaeology, with their in some cases more qualified and experienced wives, assisting their professional posts.
By the early 1950s, Peggy Piggott had co-directed and published eight hillfort excavations, advancing our understanding of the development of prehistoric settlement architecture before the advent of radiocarbon dating. Beyond hillforts, she was central to advancing the modern field of roundhouse studies, the skilled excavation of Milton Loch crannog, and to promoting open-area excavation, although these contributions would later be credited to Gerhard Bersu.
Peggy was an early advocate for Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age continuity – following in the vein of Maud Cunnington and W.J. Varley. Her theoretical understanding opted for Childe’s diffusionism, in contrast to the old invasionist views out of London by Mortimer Wheeler and Christopher Hawkes, which Stuart Piggott sought to extend to Scotland. By contrast, Peggy’s 1940s ideas would ultimately pave the way for the 1960s rejection of invasionism by a new generation of archaeologists. Her focus too on field-based interpretation was also to inspire a new generation of northern prehistorians.
Despite this, Peggy was not considered for a professional post. She had been a very useful archaeological wife, but on parting ways with Stuart in her personal life, she parted too with British archaeology – marrying again and moving to Sicily where she wrote books instead on south Italian archaeology. The result for British archaeology was that Christopher Hawkes and Stuart Piggott spread themselves rather too thinly over her area of expertise. Sadly, we are still working to correct some of the interpretive problems this left to Iron Age studies. Peggy returned to Britain in the 1970s, leading a happy retirement which focused on her study of ancient glass beads, leaving us two field-leading tomes that are still regularly consulted today.
Peggy Piggott was of one our first great later prehistorians in British archaeology and it is good, finally, to be able to recognise her as such.
Read the associated research ‘Peggy Piggott and Post-war British Archaeology‘ out now open access in European Journal of Archaeology.
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