“The carpet of the past is
being rolled up behind us
as we advance into the
future, and
before long
when we look over our
shoulders we shall see
nothing but the mirror of
ourselves.”
Ivor Noël Hume,
Historical Archaeology
(New York, 1969)
For almost seven decades
Ivor Noël Hume –
archaeologist, social
historian, dramatist and
novelist – bestrode
excavated trenches as a
colossus shining light
on the unstudied
post-medieval past. His
life spanned
extraordinary times that
he embraced to become an
extraordinary person of
a substance and style
rarely seen today.
Through his passion for
the past Noël was
revered by royalty and
students alike,
receiving honorary
doctorates from the
University of
Pennsylvania (1976) and
the College of William
and Mary (1983). In 1991
he received the J.C.
Harrington Medal, the
highest award of the
Society for Historical
Archaeology in America,
which he co-founded in
1967. Queen Elizabeth II
appointed Noël an
Officer of the British
Empire in 1992 in
recognition of his
services to British
culture.
Ivor Noël Hume
excavating a
bomb-damaged site in the
City of London for the
Guildhall Museum
(1949/early 1950)Photo:
thamesdiscovery.org
Noël
coined the phrase the
“handmaiden of history”
to describe the role of
post-medieval excavation
on the discipline, and
students and scholars
affectionately call him
the ‘godfather’ and
‘grandmentor’ of
historical archaeology.
Academics referred to
Noël as a
“larger-than-life figure
– part Sir Lancelot,
part Babe Ruth, part
Howard Carter”. His
pioneering Guide to
Artifacts of Colonial America
is
considered a bible for
understanding the
post-medieval artefacts
of America and Britain –
from types of 17th- to
18th-century glass
bottles to wig curlers
and iron padlocks –
while students
unanimously judge Martin’s Hundred
(New York, 1982) to be
the best book written in
the field.
Ivor Noël Hume never
intended becoming a
player in the nascent
field of archaeology.
Theatre was his first
love. After leaving the
army in 1945 he took a
position in London as an
assistant stage manager
for the J. Arthur Rank
organization, hoping to
advance from writing
childhood plays to
becoming a bone fide
playwright. While
knocking on the doors of
theatrical agents for
four years, Noël
happened to hear a BBC
radio show about a man
finding antiquities
along the River Thames.
With time on his hands,
Noël decided to take a
look for
himself.
Impressed
by his
handling of these
relics, the
archaeologist
Adrian
Oswald
employedNoël in the
summer of 1949 to work
on ancient remains
emerging during the
development of Bankside
Power Station, where he
quickly learnt the craft
of archaeology,
stratigraphy and how to
relate artefacts to
levels. London was
littered with ruins at
the end of World War II
and for the first time
the archaeologist had
access en masse to the
city’s hidden secrets
prior to construction.
The task was gargantuan
and by September 1949
Noël found himself
gainfully employed at
the Guildhall Museum,
where the rescue
operations were
directed, but only until
a better position in the
theatre came along. A
week into his new job,
Oswald got pneumonia and
left the museum, never
to return, leaving Noël
as the city of London’s
sole archaeologist and
collection curator
(see
Blair and Watson, ‘The
Great Fire of London:
Ivor Noël Hume’s
Investigation of the
17th-Century Material
Culture of the
Metropolis’, in E.
Klingelhofer (ed.), A Glorious Empire,
Archaeology and the
Tudor-Stuart Atlantic
World. Essays in Honor
of Ivor Noël Hume
(Oxford, 2013), 106-18).
It
was in bombed-out London that
Noël cracked the code of dating
the archaeology of post-medieval
England using wine bottles
stamped with names and dates
that he correlated to vertical
occupation levels from before
and after the Great Fire of
1666. Noël’s chronologies of
glass bottles uncorked new
vistas for dating and
understanding post-medieval
archaeology, and brought him to
the attention of Colonial
Williamsburg in Virginia. The
Englishman was invited to visit.
Spending three months in the
sun, rather than commuting home
to Wimbledon caked in mud of the
ages, sounded like a welcome
break. At Williamsburg, dug
since 1928, the
playwright turned
past-hunter found
fertile new ground for
exploration. At the time
the excavations were
essentially clearance
operations exposing the
architectural plans of
buildings. Colonial Williamsburg’s
staff knew little of
archaeology and most
artefacts uncovered were
simply thrown back into
the trenches.
Nevertheless, Noël
focused his attention on
those unwashed finds
that had been saved and
stored in old fish
boxes. As in London, Noël’s
skill set was quickly
appreciated. In 1957 he
jumped continents with
his first wife, Audrey,
to begin a career in the
United States that would
span more than five
decades. Noël rose from
the position of Chief
Archaeologist at the
Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation to Director
of Archaeology in 1964
and Foundation
Archaeologist in 1983.
During his Williamsburg
tenure he directed many
excavations at the
Public Hospital site
(1972-73, 1980-81), the
James Anderson House
(1984-75), the Chiswell
site (1970), Prentis
Store (1969),
Wetherburn’s Tavern
(1965-66), the Custis
House site (1964),
Captain Orr’s Dwelling
(1963), the Travis House
site (1962), the Anthony
Hay cabinet shop
(1960-61) and the
Coke-Garrett House
(1959). Noël’s publication
record was prodigious
and unprecedented in the
archaeology of
post-medieval America.
His two-volume final
report with Audrey Noël
Hume on The
Archaeology of Martin’s
Hundred (University
of Pennsylvania Museum
of Archaeology and
Anthropology, 2001), an
early 17th-century
settlement at Carter’s
Grove largely destroyed
in the 1622 Algonquin
Indian uprising, set the
stage for profound
physical and historical
insights into the first
decades of English
settlement in America.
Never
the retiring type, in
1988 Noël continued his
service as a consultingarchaeologist and became
the Winthrop Rockefeller
Archaeological Museum
Curator at Williamsburg
from 1988 to 1992. Noël
embarked on further
major research projects,
including the search for
Sir Walter Raleigh’s
lost colony at Roanoke
in Dare County, North
Carolina.
Making the past
accessible to the public
was key to Noël. The
exhibitions he helped
set up started with
‘Recent Discoveries in
London’ at the Guildhall
Museum in 1950 and
included a 1960s exhibit
on archaeology for the
Colonial Williamsburg
Visitor Center, an
exhibit on the
relationship of
archaeological finds to
history at the Anderson
House in Williamsburg
(1970), and the design
and creation of the
Martin’s Hundred exhibit
in the Winthrop
Rockefeller
Archaeological Museum.
Noël also wrote and
directed for Colonial
Williamsburg the film
Doorway to the Past,
which won the Cine
Golden Eagle at
Washington in 1970 and
the Chris Statuette (top
award in Social Studies
category) at the 18th
Columbus Film Festival
in 1970. Noël again
wrote and narrated Search for a Century,
Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation’s film on
archaeology at Carter’s
Grove, which in 1981 won
the gold medal at the
Twenty-Fourth Annual
Film and TV Festival in
New York.
Noël’s past was an
inclusive, generous and
non-elitist realm that
extended to marine
archaeology. In
shipwrecks he observed
“archaeological data
unparalleled on any
terrestrial site. They
are, in effect, time
capsules unintentionally
torn from the pages of
history. Unlike the
trash that the
archaeologist must make
the most from on land,
wrecked ships contain
cargoes of complete
objects, all irrefutably
associated and
possessing an
unimpeachable terminus
ante quem” (Historical
Archaeology, New York,
1969: 189). By the time
Noël joined the UK
Maritime Heritage
Foundation’s Scientific
Advisory Committee in
2012, he had published
Shipwreck! History from
the Bermuda Reefs in
1995 and Wreck and
Redemption: William
Strachey’s Saga of the
Sea Venture in
2009.
Noël
brought his great
experience in helping
turn archaeology into a
professional field in
America and solving
heritage crises to the
Maritime Heritage
Foundation’s drive to
see the first-rate
British warship the Victory, lost in
the western English
Channel in October 1744,
scientifically
excavated. The intent,
still ongoing, was for
the finds to be turned
from an inaccessible
loss to publicly
accessible in an English
museum.
By 2012 Noël had six
decades of experience in
conflict resolution,
including in the 1950s
and 1960s helping
resolve acute problems
of identity and
legitimacy in American
archaeology. Despite
these skills he told
colleagues of his
bewilderment about what
he called a highly
political ‘witch hunt’
to interfere in the
archaeological recovery
of the Victory by some
UK heritage managers.
Noël expressed concern
about why some in the
cultural heritage
community pursued a
policy favouring leaving
shipwrecks to rot or be
destroyed by trawl nets
and illicit salvors,
rather than excavated,
an approach that was
nonsensical to Noël’s
pragmatism and extensive
real-world experience.
As early as 1963 he
shared his inclusive
approach to archaeology
in Here Lies
Virginia. An
Archaeologist’s View of
Colonial Life and
History (University
Press of Virginia),
where he found it
strange that:
"A
profession dedicated to
studying and separating
one time frame from
another has such
difficulty recognizing
and being charitable
toward the phases of its
own evolution. What was
good archaeology in the
last century can be
unacceptable today, but
to condemn its
practitioners for not
being as smart as we
think we are is not only
misleading, it implies
that we lack the single
attribute that all good
archaeologists must
possess: the knowledge
and wisdom to put
ourselves in other
fellow’s historical
place."
Noël’s analysis of
UNESCO’s approach to
underwater cultural
heritage concluded that
it was rooted in
misguided regulations.
Although he accepted
that the Convention on
the Protection of the
Underwater Cultural
Heritage was created
with the best of
intentions, Noël was
worried by its misuse to
provide, as he put it:
"Wording
that uninformed
government bureaucrats
could use to deny
licenses for legitimate
archaeological work.
UNESCO’s choice of in
situ preservation as its
first goal, essentially
means “don’t do anything
that might disturb the
remains.” But we all
know that the purpose of
archaeology, whether it
be on land or
underwater, is about
disturbing the remains.
We have to dig it to see
it… In short, a code of
ethics can encompass
whatever we want to put
between its covers. If
its writers are seniors
in their sphere, we
assume that they are
right and slavishly
subscribe to their
views. We know that even
if we find flaws in
their reasoning, it can
be career damaging to
say so. Thus fear
transcends reason. The
well-intended UNESCO
2001 Convention on the
Protection of the
Underwater Cultural
Heritage is just such a
code. In its efforts to
become all embracing in
its protection of the
sunken past, it puts
much of it out of reach
of the very people it
was supposed to please
and educate… it is
remarkable that some
people in the cultural
resource community
interpret UNESCO’s
‘first option’ for in
situ preservation as a
preference or even a
requirement that any
wreck remains in situ,
i.e. unexcavated. Had
that policy been
established before the
Mary Rose was raised,
one wonders how much
public interest would
have been engendered by
knowing that the wreck
still lies in the Solent
silt? By almost every
one of UNESCO’s ‘Rules’,
the Mary Rose project
would today be in
violation, as would most
ground-breaking
underwater recoveries of
the past."
Ivor Noël Hume came to
archaeology through one
stage door and exited
through another. At the
end of his final
presentation to the
Society of Historical
Archaeology, with a
“Thank you and goodbye”,
and against a backdrop
of fervent applause and
stunned surprise, he
walked alone down the
centre aisle and slipped
out the door.
In later years Noël
continued to think
deeply and write
profusely, finishing the
play, The Life and
Death of Cap’n John,
and publishing his
masterful A Passion
for the Past. The Odyssey of a
Transatlantic
Archaeologist
(University of Virginia
Press, 2010) and Belzoni: The Giant
Archaeologists Love to
Loathe (University
of Virginia Press, 2011)
about the Italian circus
explorer to Egypt. In
his final months he was
still hard at it,
sending manuscripts to
Ceramics In America
and seeking a
publisher for yet
another completed novel.
His shining light will
be sorely missed.
Dr Ivor Noël Hume,
OBE Born London 4 November
1927, died Williamsburg
4 February 2017 Noël leaves behind his
wife, Carol, and four
stepchildren, Andrea,
David, Michael and
Kristen.
Select Writing 1950:
Discoveries on
Walbrook 1949-50
(Guildhall Museum
Publication, London).
1953: Archaeology in
Britain (Foyle,
London).
1956:
Treasure In
The Thames
(Frederick Muller,
London).
1956: ‘A Century of
London Glass Bottles,
1580-1680’, The
Connoisseur Year Book,
London, 98-103.
1957: ‘Wine Relics from
Virginia – Jamestown and
the First Colonists’,
Wine & Spirit Trade
Record, journal of
the London wine trade,
February 18, 1957,
154-60.
1961: ‘The Glass Wine
Bottle in Colonial
Virginia’, Journal
of Glass Studies,
Vol. III, Corning, New
York, 91-117.
1964: ‘Romano-British
Potteries on the
Upchurch Marshes’, Archaeologia Cantiana,
Vol. LXVIII, 72-90.
1964: ‘Archaeology:
Handmaiden to History’,
The North Carolina
Historical Review,
Vol. XLI, No. 2, 214-25.
1967: ‘Rhenish Gray
Stoneware in Colonial
America’, Antiques, Vol.
XCII, No. 3, September
1967, 349-53.
1968: ‘A Collection of
Glass from Port Royal,
Jamaica’, Historical
Archaeology, Vol.
II, 5-34.
1969:
The Wells of
Williamsburg: Colonial
Time Capsules (Colonial Williamsburg
Archaeological Series
No. 4).
1969:
Historical
Archaeology (Alfred
A. Knopf, New York).
1970: ‘Archaeology:
Doorway to the American
Past’, The Athenaeum
Annals (Athenaeum
of Philadelphia), Vol.
XVI, No. 2, 3-22.
1970: A Guide to
Artifacts of Colonial
America (Alfred A.
Knopf, New York).
1974:
All the Best
Rubbish (Harper and
Row, New York).
1982: Martin’s
Hundred (Alfred A.
Knopf, New York).
1983: ‘Pragmatism and
Professionalism: A
Cellarman’s View of the
Ivory Tower’. In A. Ward
(ed.), Forgotten
Places and Things.
Archaeological
Perspectives on American
History (Albuquerque), 1-9.
1994: The Virginia
Adventure. Roanoke to
James Towne, An
Archaeological and
Historical Odyssey
(Alfred A. Knopf, New
York).
1996:
In Search of
This & That. Tales from
an Archaeologist’s Quest
(The Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation,
Virginia).
2001:
If These Pots
Could Talk
(Chipstone Foundation,
University of New
England Press).
2001: The
Archaeology of Martin’s
Hundred, Volumes I-II
(Philadelphia,
University of
Pennsylvania Museum of
Archaeology and
Anthropology) (with
Audrey Noël Hume).
2005: Something from
the Cellar, More of This
and That (the
Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation, Virginia).
2010: A Passion for
the Past. The Odyssey of
a Transatlantic
Archaeologist
(University of Virginia
Press).
2011:
Belzoni. The
Giant that
Archaeologists Love to
Hate (University of
Virginia Press).
2014: ‘X Commandments’,
Ceramics in America
(Chipstone
Foundation).
2016: ‘A New Bloome’,
Ceramics in America
(Chipstone Foundation).
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