Margaret Murray’s Meat Curry

Abstract

IntroductionThis is a story of archaeology and empire and food. On a folded piece of paper tucked inside a black-covered volume of recipes belonging to the archaeologist Gerald Lankester Harding are handwritten recipes for 'Meat Curry' and 'Dhall'. At the bottom of the page are the words: 'Written for me at Jerash in 1937 by M. A. Murray ' (Murray, 1937). This article will analyse the writer, the recipient and the recipes to explore identity and transformation in the history of archaeology.Scholars are pulling apart the overarching narrative of imperial domination to analyse the experiences and histories of those who for a generation or generations lived within and between British colonial/imperial contexts (e. g. Lambert & Lester, 2006;Jasanoff, 2006). These histories present the British imperial experience as one of interconnectivity and overlapping financial, political, social and cultural networks. The bulk of the experiences they analyse are those of the colonial administrator, the planter, the merchant, the soldier, the missionary, the wife. The history presented here will focus on the archaeologist. Specifically, it presents the recipes as emblematic of the experiences of Margaret Alice Murray and Gerald Lankester Harding, who were British but grew up outside of Britain. They knew, intimately, a different culture, language and food. This paper highlights Murray and Harding's backgrounds -ones in which curry was prevalent -and examines the foreign contexts in which they worked to analyse the recipes' evolution and transmission. The movement of both archaeologists and these recipes feeds into an increasing interest in food as a mode of exploring connections between cultures (e. g. Collingham, 2006; LeongSalobir, 2011) and as a symbol of transnational identity (e. g. Sellick, 2010: 9-17). Introducing Margaret Murray and Gerald Lankester HardingMargaret Alice Murray (Fig. 1)

Digging with Petrie: Gerald Lankester Harding at Tell Jemmeh, 1926–1927

“…As his first teacher of ancient Egyptian language, Margaret Murray was his first access point into academic study, and it was through her encouragement that he made his first contact with Petrie and talked his way into a place on one of his digs. The two had experienced similar colonial upbringings-Harding in Singapore, Murray in India (Thornton 2014), and remained friends for life (Macdonald 2014).…”