Ad Familiares: Christopher Stray’s correspondence with Patrick Leigh Fermor
Chris Stray is known to all Classicists as someone who poses the pertinent questions. In 1988, while staying at the BSA and studying […]
Archive Story
The Gradual Decline and Reinvention of the SPHS Photographic Collection
Rubbish Theory, Michael Thompson’s classic 1979 study, takes a look at the dynamics of material value. It begins with the new, extends to the useful that gradually devalues over time […]
1936: Exhibition Season & The British School at Athens
There comes a time in the life of an institution when it feels the need to reflect on its past glories and fêted in the form of a series of […]
Floating colours
George Finlay’s collection of books spans from the 1790s to 1870s, a period when marbled paper flourished and when many new techniques were introduced by marbling firms keen to outdo […]
Magoula Hunting or The Romance of Excavation
In the summer of 2020, ‘Digital Mycenae’ went live, digitally reuniting the Mycenae excavation archives held at the Faculty of Classics Cambridge and the British School at Athens. Based on […]
Archiving Women in Archaeology: Helen Thomas Waterhouse
Personal papers of scholars associated with the British School at Athens represent an important part of the Archive. As well as expertise in individuals’ fields, such archives provide a glimpse […]
Creating order: first steps in the archival arrangement of the Mervyn R. Popham Personal Papers
Hello! I’m Kate Wilson, a MARM (Masters of Archives and Records Management) student from the University of Liverpool. In January this year, I came over to the British School at […]
Fragmented Archives: an Example of the Photographs of J.A. Spranger in the SPHS Collection
How are archives formed? I’ve noticed that archives are incomplete by nature – winnowed from their original “core” – a representative of the whole. Selection of what is preserved may […]
First Adventures in Revolutionary Greece: Fiction or reality, and does it matter?
In my previous Archive Story, Philhellenism redux- Finlay rises, I sought to shed some light on how George Finlay, and some others like him, decided to join the Greek revolution. […]
Return to Sparta: the 1924-1927 BSA Excavations at Sparta in the SPHS Collection
Building on the success of the British School at Athens (BSA) excavations at Sparta in 1906-1910, the BSA returned to Sparta after WWI. The decision was made sometime during the […]