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

Rachael Thyrza Sparks

doi:10.5334/bha-609

Abstract

Gerald Lankester Harding (1901–1979) was an influential archaeologist and epigrapher whose field career began in 1926, when he set out to work for Flinders Petrie at Tell Jemmeh in British Mandate Palestine. Harding’s experiences on this, his first dig, were captured through his personal diary and photographs, which form part of a larger archive now housed in the UCL Institute of Archaeology Collections. This material is presented here for the first time, exploring how Harding came into archaeology, what it was like to work and live on a Petrie excavation, and to show how personal histories like this can contribute to a wider understanding of historic archaeological practice and methodology.

Highlights

Gerald Harding was a British archaeologist and epigrapher who spent most of his professional career working in the Southern Levant
Subsequent excavations of the site by a team from the Smithsonian Institute in the 1970s and 1980s found several burials in their uppermost phase; these were difficult to date because of lack of finds, but could have been anything from the Mamluk period to the present day (Ben-Shlomo and Van Beek 2014: 146; 574)
While the Harding archive provides us with one man’s personal experience of an excavation and moment in time, it forms part of a much larger mosaic of contemporary events and developments, with a value that extends beyond the purely biographical. It was through experiences such as these that archaeologists like Harding learnt practical field techniques, from how to dig to how to manage a workforce, while absorbing something of the attitudes and philosophies of their mentors, in Harding’s case, Petrie and Starkey

Summary

Rachael Thyrza Sparks

Gerald Lankester Harding (1901–1979) was an influential archaeologist and epigrapher whose field career began in 1926, when he set out to work for Flinders Petrie at Tell Jemmeh in British Mandate Palestine. Harding’s experiences on this, his first dig, were captured through his personal diary and photographs, which form part of a larger archive housed in the UCL Institute of Archaeology Collections. This material is presented here for the first time, exploring how Harding came into archaeology, what it was like to work and live on a Petrie excavation, and to show how personal histories like this can contribute to a wider understanding of historic archaeological practice and methodology

Introduction

Conclusions