Reflections in shadow: Excavating the personal archives of Paul Jacobsthal and EM Jope

Abstract

The formation of archives has been a key facet of the archaeological discipline since its inception, critical in the production of knowledge from the destructive excavation that occurs in the field. The ongoing ‘archival shift’ within the humanities from archives as mere sources of secondary information to primary topics of research has presented new potential for the study of historic archaeological archives. This article explores the personal archives of two great scholars of Iron Age Celtic art, Paul Jacobsthal and EM Jope, held at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford. Shedding new light on their engagement and interaction with the objects that they studied, the author explores the archive’s power to illuminate the ways in which the scholars’ methods, experiences and encounters shaped the knowledge that they produced about the past. Through presenting the archives as both primary sources of historical information and vibrant material entities, worthy of ‘excavation’ in their own right, the article advocates an assemblage-based archaeological approach to archival engagement.

Reading Field Diaries against the Grain: The Notable and the Absent in Syrian Archaeology

“…In both of the examples I examine here -archives from the Syrian archaeological sites of Palmyra and Dura-Europos -that is the case, with the archives being secondary to the "real" material, the archaeological objects. Indeed, 'archaeological archives' is broadly a category which has been retrospectively invented, in part to deal with backlogged field data, although recent years have seen a shift in attention towards archaeological archives as a subject in their own right (Baird and McFadyen 2014;Riggs 2017;Hitchcock 2020;Ward 2022). Nonetheless, this status of archaeological records as secondary is one that should probably worry us, one among many crises to do with the storage of the vast amount of archaeological 'stuff' the discipline generates (Brusius, Singh, and Kersel 2017).…”

Arqueología colaborativa: conservación y análisis de una urna funeraria, Traslasierra, Córdoba, Argentina

“…El trabajo con museos locales y sus colecciones es una tarea fundamental dentro de la arqueología actual. Esta línea de investigación denominada arqueología de los museos o de los depósitos consiste en "excavar" en busca de nueva información en los museos y sus archivos (Baird y McFadyen, 2014;Hitchcock, 2021;Hicks y Stevenson, 2013;Lindskoug, 2019;Wingfield, 2018). Esto implica realizar tareas de manejo de colecciones, conservación, y a veces digitalización de todos estos acervos.…”