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Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library 101: Investigating the Haverfield Archive / Part IV

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The Bodleian Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library’s Haverfield Archive is perhaps best described as an assortment of archaeological paraphernalia. From coloured prints to illustrations of mosaic pavements, site plans and publications the archive has the potential to serve as a great source of information for researchers working on Roman Britain. In the final post of this series (posts I, II and III were published in 2020), I want to concentrate on why there is an archive in the first place. I believe that this is an important question we should be asking when considering all of these collected documents. When I first viewed the archive in 2019, it was unclear why the notable archaeologist and ancient historian Francis G. Haverfield (1860-1919) had decided to collect images of Roman floor mosaics as well as of related art works and other archaeological discoveries, assembling them within a very particular framework: Sometimes the images are organised according to chronology or geographic location, but also quite frequently their design or iconography is what makes them part of a specific group. The motivation behind the archive appeared to have been lost from social memory and the key players behind it are no longer here to give their reasons. Therefore, our only option is to piece together what clues have been left behind. Haverfield himself also left a text-based archive but this has never been catalogued and there is no finding aid to it; in any event, the Covid lockdown prevented prolonged access during my 12-month graduate library traineeship (September 2019-August 2020), the period when I was examining the collection. Working on archaeological sites, the only clues we have of people from the past are the objects that they have thrown away or accidentally lost. Since there may have been a reason why documents were grouped together in specific ways, I made sure that the Haverfield floor mosaic images were identified as belonging to the same assemblages in which I found them.

Throughout his life, Haverfield remained convinced that archaeology needed better funding. As mentioned in the first post, in his will he left his papers and books to the University of Oxford. After his death in 1919, Haverfield also left a substantial bequest, for which the University appointed a group of academics to serve as administrators. This group would develop policies for the use of its funds, with the intention of enhancing the study of Roman Britain. This included contributing towards the expense of collecting and preparing materials for publication. These planned projects included A Corpus of Roman Bronzes in Britain and A Corpus of Roman Glass. The prints of Roman floor mosaics in the Haverfield Archive could have been materials gathered for a similar project. It is possible that a group of scholars gathered together prints for an eventual publication, but that the project failed to materialise. With early antiquarian discoveries of mosaics, nobody from the field had really decided to create a nationwide inventory of Roman mosaics in Britain. Haverfield and his associates may have intended to produce this collected inventory.

So-called ‘Lion mosaic’ found at Aldborough (Inventory n. 2.13)

Haverfield already had connections to the archaeological sites where some of the mosaics originated. For example, the Yorkshire Archaeological Society began another excavation on the Roman remains at Aldborough (for description see blog post II), reportedly under  Haverfield’s guidance.

It is possible that Haverfield was using his image collection, along with descriptions from previous sites, to inform his approach to the excavation at Aldborough. In archaeological reports, it is very typical for there to be a description of previous excavations at the same site. In fact, it could have been Haverfield’s intention to include illustrations of the mosaics previously found at Aldborough in a new publication in order to draw attention to Roman archaeology in Britain.

Further evidence of Haverfield’s intention to publish the documents in his visual archive is the presence of several prints of the same floor mosaic found at Stonesfield (see blog posts II and III). By 1713, two influential illustrations of the mosaic were widely available. One of these was the version produced by Thomas Hearne and Michael Burghers, which I discussed in the second blog post in this series. The other illustration was made by Edward Loving and was circulated more widely than Hearne and Burgher’s version. Similar to Hearne and Burgher’s version, Loving’s illustration was presented to the Royal Society in full colour. Loving proposed to the Society that the illustration should be engraved on copper plate. Presumably, the Society was won over by Loving’s persuasiveness and ordered a copy of the illustration to be framed. Reportedly, Hearne disliked Loving’s version of the mosaic as it allegedly had many inaccuracies.

 

Inventory n. 1.15

Loving’s version of the Stonesfield mosaic could well be Inventory n. 1.15, as there are handwritten notes on both sides of the print. These pencilled notes include ‘same in Piccino’, ‘For Venice’ and ‘Pitisco Lexicon antiq.’. As arbitrary as these notes seem, they do make sense when context is provided since Loving’s version was republished in later international editions. It was first included as a frontispiece in Samuel Pitiscus’ Lexicon Antiquitatum (Leeuwarden, 1713) and a smaller version of the illustration was made by Suor Piccino in Venice, 1719. Suor Piccino’s version was then copied for a compilation of antiquities by the French antiquary Benard de Montfaucon (1655-1741) for his Antiquity Explain’d (Paris, 1719). This version may be present in the archive since Inventory n. 2.2A also has handwritten notes including ‘From Montfaucon’. The print itself is very similar to Inventory n. 1.15. The evidence of the multiple print versions of the Stonesfield mosaic and how several prints were even annotated indicates that a plan was in place to compare all of these versions. Thus, it is very possible that this material was intended to form a section of work in an eventual publication.

A further indication that materials in this archive were intended to be published, is the way in which Haverfield grouped and presented the images. There are various examples in the archive of mosaic prints being combined onto one large cardboard sheet. Inventory n. 1.6 B is of interest as at the top of one such cardboard sheet where ‘Northamptonshire’ has been pencilled in. It is these examples of assembled images which make the archive unique, as the documents are more than just a collection of images taken from different publications. Similarly, Inventory n. 1.14 also has ‘Northamptonshire 1’ pencilled in the same handwriting. This may reveal some of Haverfield’s approaches to these illustrations. Haverfield may have decided to paste certain prints of mosaics onto the same sheet if they all came from the same county. Indeed, the mosaics featured in Inventory n. 1.6B and 1.14 all came from places in Northamptonshire. The layout of the document may indicate how Haverfield wanted the prints to be arranged for the plates of a future publication.

There are some further instances, where the illustrations have been pasted on both sides of a cardboard sheet. For example, Inventory n. 1.5 has one side featuring the ‘Orpheus’ mosaic from Littlecote Park (see post iii) and the other side is of a mosaic found in Rudge.

‘Orpheus’ mosaic discovered at Littlecote Park (Inventory n. 1.5A)

 

Both mosaics were discovered in Wiltshire, further showing how Haverfield continued to collate images in groups of different counties. Inventory n. 1.10 has two sides of beautifully coloured mosaic prints from Castor with ‘Northamptonshire 4’ and ‘Northamptonshire 5’ pencilled on each side. This also illustrates how important the Haverfield Archive is, as we can use it to follow the thought process behind Haverfield’s choices for publication.

 

 

There are several exceptions to the geographical approach, suggesting that the way in which Haverfield collated his images was at times completely different. On one side of Inventory n. 1.17 is a print featuring a series of Roman coins at the top, with an image of a mosaic below. It is unclear where exactly the mosaic and the coins are from. The print does provide a clue, with the Earl of Harborough attributed as the patron, as Harborough is a district located within Leicestershire. The print on the reverse shows fragments of painted wall plaster from Aldborough whose design resembles that of floor mosaic patterns. From the description, they appear to be an illustrated plate taken from Henry Ecroyd Smith’s Reliquiae Isurianae.

 

 

A contradictory example is Inventory n. 2.2. One side features Edward Loving’s version of the Stonesfield mosaic and the other features a small print of a mosaic from Carthage. Aside from some similarities in iconography, these prints appear to have little to no connection to each other. These are certainly not anomalies. In Folder 3, the first two sheets I indexed comprised both sides having prints pasted on them which also appeared to be unrelated, chronologically or geographically, to each other. It is possible that there were reasons behind each decision to attach a print on the reverse of another one, but such motivations are now lost (or require more in-depth study).

Finally, I wanted to discuss how Haverfield’s theory of Romanization applies to the archive. I introduced the concept of Romanization in the first post of this series. Haverfield sought to elucidate the incorporation of Britain into the Roman Empire, which he viewed as a cultural assimilation rather than enforced acceptance. Haverfield was the first British academic to systematically consider the cultural consequences of the 43 C.E. Roman invasion through archaeological evidence. For Haverfield, this evidence suggested that Britain fully participated in Roman culture. His theory challenged previous views — which reflected British early 20th century colonial values — that it was through invasion and colonisation that Britons became more ‘civilised’ and ‘Romanized’. For Haverfield, therefore, the term ‘Romanization’, therefore, indicated a more ongoing and active process. To him, Roman Britain was not a stage of British history, but rather one of several cumulative parts of the Roman Empire. It is no wonder that he may have developed an interest in Roman floor mosaics, especially if they mirrored similar designs in Imperial Rome.

 

 

Haverfield once told an audience ‘It is no use to know about Roman Britain in particular unless you know about the Roman Empire in general’. Roman Britain was not a stand-alone entity but was rather one part of an all-encompassing, global Empire. In order to fully understand Roman Britain, one has also to study Imperial Rome. It is difficult to say whether Haverfield himself was affected by the superior philosophy developed by many affluent gentlemen during the peak of the British Empire. In the third post of this series I discussed how the antiquarians who created illustrations of mosaics which partly constitute the Haverfield Archive may have perceived floor mosaic remains as a tangible link between the British and the Roman Empires. Whilst historians should always seek to remain neutral when exploring the past, it is often impossible to not be influenced by the period of history one is living in.

Haverfield was once quoted as saying that with the Roman Empire:

‘‘Its imperial system, alike in its differences and similarities, lights up our own Empire, for example India, at every turn. The methods by which Rome incorporated and denationalised and assimilated more than half of its wide dominions, and the success of Rome, unintended but perhaps complete, in spreading its Graeco-Roman culture over more than a third of Europe and a part of Africa, concern in many ways our own aged Empire” (Journal of Roman studies, vol I, pg xviii-xix, quoted from Craster, 1920: 70).

To an extent, therefore, Haverfield was making direct comparisons between the Roman and British Empires. Like his contemporaries, Haverfield’s thinking may have been somewhat influenced by colonial attitudes. British imperial expansion combined with an education which sought to celebrate the accomplishments of classical civilisation may have informed his world view. Despite this, it is unclear in the above quote whether Haverfield is explicitly glorifying the British Empire or, rather, condemning it.

The ultimate purpose of Haverfield’s visual archive is not completely clear. Although evidence points towards how Haverfield may have gathered illustrations of archaeological discoveries for a planned publication, it is never explicitly stated that this was his intention. Throughout the process of indexing a small part of this visual archive I felt as if I was following a trail of bread crumbs. Each handwritten note, each new copy of the same print was another crumb of evidence. However, Haverfield’s decision to give his papers, books, and some of his wealth to the University of Oxford in order to enhance the study of archaeology is a clear intention. As mentioned at the beginning of this post, Haverfield was convinced that the discipline of archaeology needed better funding and research. It would not be surprising if he had wanted his life’s mission to continue long after his death. By passing on his knowledge and funds, he would guarantee the continuation of the study of the archaeology of Roman Britain. I hope that now the archive has been advertised  through a digital medium, there will be a renewed interest in its contents for future research projects.

This is the final blog post in this series. I would like to thank the Sackler’s Librarian-in-Charge, Clare Hills-Nova, for inviting me to work on this project and providing support and advice throughout. I would also like to thank the Classics and Classical Archaeology Librarian, Charlotte Goodall, for her advice and guidance. Finally, a special thanks to Samuel Bolsover who proof-read all of my work.

Chloe Bolsover
Graduate Library Trainee (2019-2020)
Taylor Institution Library

Learning and  Teaching Librarian
Sheffield Hallam University

References

18th September 1903. Yorkshire Archaeological Society. British Architect. 216-217

Craster, HHE. 1920. Francis Haverfield. The English Historical Review, 63-70

Draper, J, Freshwater, T, Henig, M, and Hinds, S. 2000. From Stone to Textile: The Bacchus Mosaic at Stonesfield, Oxon, and the Stonesfield Embroidery. Journal of the British Archaeological Association. 153:1, 1-29.

Freeman, PWM. 2007. The Best Training-Ground for Archaeologists. Oxford: Oxbow Books

Hingley, Richard. The recovery of Roman Britain 1586-1906: a colony so fertile. 2008. Oxford. Oxford University Press

Levine, J. 1978. The Stonesfield Pavement: Archaeology in Augustan England. Eighteenth Century Studies, Vol 11, No. 3. 340-361

Todd, M. 2003. The Haverfield Bequest, 1921-2000 and the Study of Roman Britain. Britannia, Vol 34, 35-40

Art, Archaeology, and Ancient World 101: Supporting Classics in Oxford

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Tempora mutantur: Two Decades as a Classics Librarian
By Charlotte Goodall

 

Acknowledgement: Reproduced by kind permission of the author; and of the editor of Antigone: An Open Forum for Classics

 

 

September next year will mark my twentieth anniversary as Classics Librarian for the Bodleian Library [and the Sackler Library] in the University of Oxford. My time overseeing the Classics collection at Oxford has coincided with a period of great change, both in librarianship and in the way scholarship in Classics is carried out.

I came into the job in the early days of electronic resources, when very few journals were available online, and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae was still only available on CD-ROM, loaded onto specific computers and with a simple text based search interface. In the Bodleian, we operated a book-ordering system unchanged since the 1930s, consisting of hand-written slips, filled out in triplicate, inserted into zinc cases and sent down pneumatic tubes from the reading room to the bookstack. The concept of ordering books online via the library catalogue, accessible through the internet, was still very new.

Tunnel under Broad Street.

The book tunnel connecting the Bodleian beneath Broad Street.

In Classics, we were quite advanced for a humanities subject already, as we had the TLG as well as the Packard Humanities Index CDs. These would allow basic searching of Classical Greek and Latin texts and some epigraphical works. By today’s standards, it was clunky, but at the time these resources were starting to revolutionise the way the subject was being approached, and to challenge the way Classics was served by the libraries and librarians who were the concierges of this new information landscape.

I arrived in Oxford as a graduate student in 1999, having completed my B.A. in Classics at University College Dublin. For me, Oxford was a jarring experience. Dublin had been a fabulous city to be a student; bustling, exciting, with a cosmopolitan nightlife and a feeling of modernity and fun. Oxford, on the other hand, felt provincial, dark and quiet. Everything shut at 6pm (apart from one shop at the top of Headington High Street that was open 24 hrs: students would take taxis there and back to buy cigarettes and cheap bottles of wine). Even the streetlamps were less bright. College dinners (formal hall every night, gowns required) were fun at first but the quality of the food was sometimes astonishingly awful (mutton stew, overboiled carrots, not enough potatoes to go around).

Radcliffe Camera at night.

Oxford’s Radcliffe Camera of an evening.

Academically, I was extremely fortunate to have been taught by some of the finest Classical scholars of our time. I had papyrology classes from Peter Parsons; I got sent to a terrifying meeting with the philosopher Myles Burnyeat at All Souls (he was surprisingly kind). I went to Nigel Wilson’s palaeography seminars, and listened to Martin West’s lectures on Greek Metre. I spent most of my time in the libraries. The Bodleian Lower Reading Room had only one row of desks that were wired with sockets for laptops, and I would be waiting for the doors to open every morning to secure one of these precious spaces.

There was also the library of the Ashmolean Museum (the predecessor of the Sackler Library) which was located at the back of the museum, accessed through a door at the end of the Cast Gallery. The Ashmolean Library was tiny, with a precarious spiral staircase of filigree cast-iron that would take you up to the mezzanine floor (a warning to female readers not to wear skirts was part of the induction process!). There were anglepoise lamps on the desks, and a sense that this was where “serious scholarship” was taking place.

It had now become clear that this “serious scholarship” was probably not for me. I enjoyed my time as a graduate student, but realised that I didn’t want to be an academic. There were other things in my life that brought me joy, and I didn’t want to be tied to a lifestyle that demanded so much of me. So I got a part-time job with Oxfam as an archival assistant, which taught me some of the basics of information management, and helped me recognise that I wanted to work in an area that used my education. As someone who studied exclusively in these libraries as a student, I knew their collections intimately. I was also curious about how libraries were organised and managed. Timing worked in my favour, and when I was finally in a position to apply, the job of Classics Librarian happened to become vacant.

Entrance to Sackler Library.

The Art, Archaeology, and Ancient World Library, Oxford.

My predecessor had been an old-fashioned Librarian, who ruled over the Bodleian Lower Reading Room with a stern eye and hand-catalogued every book on the shelves. My role was expanded to encompass the newly-opened Sackler Library, and I was to oversee the provision for Classics across two sites. The Sackler had absorbed the collections of the old Ashmolean Library, as well as the Art History, Archaeology, and Ancient Near East collections, and had also taken in the Classics Lending Library for undergraduates.

The building was a new-build neo-Classical rotunda, tucked in behind the museum; it had been designed as a traditional library, though at a time when libraries were changing quickly. It housed the lending collection for Classics, and would in time become one of the preeminent collections in the world for Classical Studies, Egyptology and Ancient Near East, Art History, and Classical Archaeology. For the first time in Oxford, Classics had a budget and an individual (me) whose job it was to oversee the purchase of material published across the world, in multiple languages, covering the entire scope of Classical studies. I was also trained in the traditions of cataloguing, and the archaic workings of the Bodleian, with its confusing collection of classification schemes and complicated procedures.

At the same time, the relatively novel concept of electronic provision was gaining momentum. Journals, especially from English speaking countries, were increasingly published online, although the subscriptions were often complex and expensive. Online publishing was in its infancy and publishers were struggling with figuring out how to adapt to the evolving requirements of their customers.

Shelving in CSF.

Some of the fifteen miles of shelves at the Bodleian Libraries’ Book Store, Swindon.

Increasingly, as we moved through the mid and late 2000s, libraries were at the forefront of pushing innovation and facilitating new approaches to scholarship. The TLG went fully online in 2008, rendering the CD-ROMs obsolete, and Brepols’ Library of Latin Texts had an online searchable interface for Latin that was superior to the old Packard Humanities Institute disks[1]. Perseus, which had existed since the 1980s, was showing how open-source, web-based resources could be developed, giving access to searchable lexica for the first time.[2] Big publishers such as Brill started to digitise some of their large works of scholarship (such as the Jacoby, the essential collection of fragmentary Greek historians which we first purchased online in 2007).[3] Digitisation became the buzzword of the time.

In the libraries, we had to help our readers and scholars access these new resources, and figure out how to host and service them. Google partnered with the Bodleian, creating digital scans of the Bodleian’s 19th century collections in 2009. This project was overly ambitious for the time, as the technology was not quite ready for it, and the scans were often of poor quality; also, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which automatically converts printed type into a digital document, was not available at the time. However, there was a clear appetite for digital texts, and the technology was catching up with the requirements of readers.

Sophocles title page.Title-page of Elmsley’s edition of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (Oxford, 1811), one of nearly a million 19th-century books scanned from the Bodleian Library for the Google Books project.

In Oxford, as the 2010s came around, issues of space and conservation were impossible to ignore. The opening of the Gladstone Link, which used the refurbished area of the old bookstack under the Radcliffe Camera and the tunnel that attached this to the Old Library, was the first big physical change to the fabric of the buildings since the 1930s.

It had become clear that instead of the old bookstack, a modern “book storage facility” was needed, and it proved impossible to build such a facility in Oxford. It ended up being constructed in Swindon, 30 miles away. The facility provides a modern, climate-controlled environment where the majority of our books are stored, to be fetched when required by readers. The old bookstack and the 1930s “New Bodleian” were refurbished as the beautiful Weston Library, which opened in 2015.

New Library on Broad Street.Refurbished Weston Library.

The Bodleian’s Weston Library (below), the recent refurbishment of the New Bodleian (pictured above in 2009).

It was always difficult to balance the different media of publication with the needs of our different readers. While so much was becoming available online, it was clear that in certain circumstances, reading print would always be preferred. However, it took the COVID-19 pandemic to fully break down some of the barriers and preconceptions around using electronic publications. As a library service, we had to pivot quickly to provide fully remote services, and we were able to introduce scanning on demand, and a hugely expanded library of electronic texts. Now our library buildings are as busy as ever, but our electronic provision continues to expand: we are, for instance, the largest user of the TLG in the world.

Open Access is our newest challenge. The academic publishing world has changed hugely in the last few years, and open-access journal publishing is now a requirement for all funding bodies in the UK and for the REF.[4] Open Access monograph publishing will be a requirement in the future. The cost of academic journal publishing and access has been outsourced to the libraries, and it is a challenge to manage this in a fair and understandable way. Classics still follows a relatively traditional publication model, but Open Access is here to stay, and deals between libraries and publishers increasingly dictate what journals are accessible to researchers.

Venn Diagram of Open Access standards.

A Venn diagram of “Open Access colours”.

As librarians we are required to understand often confusing, fast-changing rules and concepts, and to be able to communicate them to our readers. As libraries, we have been paying huge amounts of money to facilitate access to journals, for which our own academics often acted as editors. The future of library provision will involve negotiating and understanding the quickly evolving world of Open Access publishing, and helping our academics do the same.

Trends in scholarship come and go, and the books that are published every year reflect this. Each week, we librarians receive a spreadsheet of every academic book received by the Bodleian. I scan the lists, picking out the Classics books and deciding where they should go. It gives me a perspective on how some of these titles could have been published at any time in the past century – but the scholarship and technology used to produce them have changed beyond recognition. As libraries, we house and preserve the physical or digital books and retain their contents for posterity, but we also facilitate the infrastructure that allows the scholarship that produces these books to take place.

Duke Humfrey's Library interior. Arts End.

Duke Humfrey’s Library, the oldest reading room in the Bodleian. Humphrey of Lancaster (1390–1447), 1st Duke of Gloucester (and youngest son of Henry IV), bequeathed 281 manuscripts to the university.

I was given the responsibility of looking after the archive of the Sackler Library, which holds the papers of a number of prominent Classicists and Archaeologists from the twentieth century. Part of my work involves making these papers available to scholars who are interested in the history of Classical scholarship, and the history of excavation and the study of Roman Britain. It always strikes me that the generation of scholars who left behind these detailed written remains will, in some ways, be the last: so much of today’s ephemera is created digitally, and it is very unclear how such material will be preserved for posterity. A notebook or a photograph from 1923 is far more accessible and more easily conserved than, for example, something saved on a 3.5-inch diskette in 2003. This will also change the way we understand the development of our subject in years to come.

The decisions we make as scholars and librarians affect the way our subject is studied in the future. The way we document these decisions will inform future scholars and librarians and their own perspectives and interests. This is one of the things that continue to intrigue and excite me about my role and about the future path of Classical scholarship.

Charlotte Goodall

Charlotte Goodall
Subject Librarian for Classics & Classical Archaeology
Bodleian Libraries

Notes

[1] The Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) was founded in 1987, and provided searchable digital texts of Classical Latin authors and epigraphical texts. In the 1990s and 2000s, these were issued on CD-ROM and had to be loaded onto individual computers, although they later became networkable. The PHI still exists as a web-based searchable database

[2] The Perseus Digital Library (formally the Perseus Project) is an open-access, open-source collection of Classical texts, translations, and other resources freely available online.

[3] Brill‘s New Jacoby is a digital edition of Felix Jacoby’s Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker (Fragments of the Greek Historians) Parts1–3 (published 1923–94).

[4] The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is an evaluation of British universities conducted by the national research funding bodies to assess the research carried out by these institutions and inform their future funding allocations.