British School at Athens : Archive Stories

The ‘Archive Stories’ page highlights BSA Archive projects from the hands-on work of processing collections (cataloguing, preventative preservation, digitization) to the exhibitions utilizing our archival material. It also presents the latest archive related research from the broad range of researchers consulting the BSA archives on topics from archaeological investigations to byzantine and early modern history; as well as complementing the Annual Bader Archive Lecture. We hope to use this page as a venue to make all the wonderful hidden ‘Archive Stories’ available to the public as they happen!

December 20, 2023

Cataloguing the 1936 Exhibition Collection

The year is 1936, and the British School at Athens is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. What better way to celebrate than an exhibition in London, displaying photographs, artwork, and physical items commemorating the activities undertaken at the School in its first half-century of existence? The year is 2023, and over ...

July 27, 2022

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 how European monoglot travellers used Latin to communicate, Stray wrote to Patrick Leigh Fermor, the celebrated travel writer who had a house at Kardamyli in the southern ...

July 20, 2022

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 until it becomes rubbish. However, some material goods – Thompson's class of 'durables' – begin to acquire value again. The ...

July 13, 2022

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 special events such as public lectures, conversazione, and ceremonial banquets. In 1936, the British School at Athens (BSA) turned 50, ...

June 1, 2022

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 each other. We can see the changing fashions during this period hidden inside Finlay’s books. Marbling came to Europe via ...

May 26, 2022

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 this project's success, we began to formulate a plan for ‘Digital Thessaly’. This was designed to be a collaborative project ...

May 12, 2022

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 into their working methods and are testimony to personal histories. When I arrived at the BSA from the MARM (Masters ...

May 10, 2022

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 Athens as part of a 2-week placement to learn about description and arrangement within an archive. I had the pleasure ...

May 4, 2022

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 be intentional or arbitrary. In some cases, collections have been split up and dispersed, fragments ending up in a variety ...

April 13, 2022

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. In doing so, I drew on a note that Finlay wrote about himself and sent to C.C. Felton in the ...

Archive Stories