Caitlin O’Grady’s post ‘Sticking, Mending and Restoring: the conservator’s role in archaeology’, has inspired me to write a few more words.  I refer particularly to the footage of the lady repairing pots which Caitlin believes may be my Great Aunt Olive Starkey. I am grateful to her for creating Auntie’s first ‘outing’ and for showing her contributions to archaeology. 
 
On looking at the footage I too believe it may be her, although as Caitlin says, all we see is a pair of hands (wearing a pretty bracelet) but they do look like her arms!  Olive never went to Lachich (Tell Duweir) - with my detective hat on I believe this sequence may have been filmed in London. One of the photos below shows Olive wearing an overall and working on an object in a box next to a window – very similar to the footage which also shows what look like overall sleeves rolled up.
 
I would love to believe it is her, and thought the following additional personal and family information about her and her work may also be of interest as an addition to Caitlin’s post and film clip.
 
Caitlin refers to women "helping out" in the background of archaeology and I am glad to write this tribute to Olive as she was certainly one of the unsung Ladies of Lachish. 

​Olive Norah Starkey – my great Aunt - was born in Stoke Newington, Hackney, London in January 1896, younger sister of James Leslie Starkey, archaeologist, and Director of Lachish 1931-1938.
 
Her father was an Architect and Surveyor (James Starkey of St. Luke’s and Highbury), The Starkeys hailed from London and the family tree dates back to Roger Starkey, Mercer of London, who was granted a coat of arms in 1543 under the reign of King Henry VIII. 

​According to Auntie Olive’s family tree, it is also strongly believed that our ancestor Edward Hoare, born 1760, Hever Castle, is a descendant of the famous Hoare family, including Sir Richard Colt Hoare, distinguished archaeologist in Wiltshire, who excavated Stonehenge.
 
Olive and Leslie were children by their father’s second marriage in 1894 to the widow Louisa Brown (nee Pike) of Holloway. Their elder halfsisters, Louie and Eva Brown, were their Mother’s children from her first marriage   Mr. Starkey had no children with his first wife Isabella who died in 1892.

​By the time she left school her father was quite elderly, and her mother unwell and she devoted her time to caring for them both until she was 30.  She was a homebody and was a loving and loyal daughter, subsequently spending much of her life at home, and sadly never married. 

She was a refined, happy, kind, affectionate and gentle lady, and very individual with a sense of fun. She was very sociable and her nephew John (Leslie’s son) remembers her hosting sumptious tea parties with guests from her wide and interesting circle of friends. (There are many wonderful old photos of people in her collection – some undoubtedly family, but most unfortunately unknown to us.) I too remember, as a young teenager on visits in the late 60s - mid 70s, her entertaining us with intriguing parlour games and reading our tealeaves!

She unfortunately needed corrective glasses for a ‘wonky eye’ (strabismus) – but this never held her back or interfered with her ability to carry out fine work, and indeed she helped her brother-in-law (husband of her halfsister Eva) in his jewellery business carrying out repairs (we have a work-box with all her instruments, and full of beads, semi-precious stones, amethyst beads, seed pearls, etc. etc. and all sorts of accoutrements of the trade, and it is likely she also worked on the beautiful Lachish necklaces. Eventually she moved to a house in Grosvenor Gardens, London which she shared with some other ladies.
 
She was intensely proud of her brother Leslie and wholeheartedly supported his work by painstakingly repairing, reconstructing and restoring the pots and decorated vessels which formed the collection from Lachish and had been sent back to the UK. 

The pot being mended in Caitlin’s clip is definitely from Lachish; the finished article was a polychrome vase of about 1550 BC with figures of an ibex and fish one side and an ibex and bird the other side which was part of the expedition exhibitions of the 1930s and is now in the British Museum.

​Much of this work was done at the Institute of Archaeology in Regent’s Park, where later she also taught students how to conserve the artefacts from Lachish and other sites. 

​Many of the Lachish pots can be seen at the British Museum in their Levant Section, Gallery 57, which also houses the Lachish Ewer, the pot which inspired the Lachish Emblem, and the above pot shown in the clip.  

In March 2007, an exhibition called A Future for the Past was organised by the Institute of Archaeology in London on Sir Flinders Petrie and his work in Palestine.  This naturally included finds by Starkey and we recognised Olive’s distinctive handwriting on the description cards in the displays.

​However Olive was also renowned for her fine work in embroidery and needlework, winning competitions for Fancy Needlework Illustrated and The Needlewoman, and she belonged to various Ladies Societies, including The Ladies Work Society.  I have a letter from a lady she made a lace tray cloth for saying "it is the most magnificent cloth I have ever seen" and also a template Olive had prepared for a lace collar very much like the one her stepsister Louie is wearing in the first photo above. 
 
When the Emblem for Lachish was picked she made the Lachish Banner which was flown in the camp in Palestine.  John had kept the Banner with him for over fifty years at his home in Canada and at the memorial service held in Jerusalem for his father in 1988 he presented it to Prof. David Ussishkin. 

It now resides in the Megiddo Museum at Tel Aviv University.  Ussishkin adopted the Lachish emblem too for the covers of his renewed excavation reports on Lachish.
 
The design for the Lachish emblem was based on a painted potsherd - The Lachish Ewer – chosen by Sir Henry Wellcome himself. Olga Tuffnell told Mary (Leslie’s daughter) that she did many drafts before Sir Henry was satisfied with the result and It became the emblem of the expedition, appearing on all notepaper and allied paperwork, advertising and publications.

It shows rams or ibexes stretching up to a palm tree (the tree of life), together with a suckling animal, and was inspired from a drawing on the Ewer - the original inscription on the ewer is roughly translated as ‘gift to my lady (goddess)’.

​Olive also crocheted a lace tray mat as a gift to her brother based on the same design – both the Mat and its detailed template which she made are now with me.

Tragically Leslie was senselessly murdered in Palestine on 10th January 1938 on the Hebron Road travelling to Jerusalem for the grand opening of the Rockefeller Museum which was also going to showcase his work at Lachish.  He was buried on Mount Zion the next day.  Olive accompanied Leslie's wife Madge and son John to his memorial service on 18th January at St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster (nestled next to Westminster Cathedral) – there were over 550 people in attendance!
 
Olive was deeply affected by his death, but her love for her brother was such that she was determined to bring his work to fruition. 
 
She tirelessly worked with Olga Tufnell after the war to bring the Lachish Books II, III and IV to completion -  in between her A.R.P. work!* An article on Olive and Olga's work appeared in The Evening Standard in June 1940 entitled ‘‘Palestine Excavation Goes on – Two women direct it from London". 
 
Olga always thanked Olive in the Lachish acknowledgements.  For example, in Book II she wrote: 

"Miss Olive Starkey has been at work on the repair and reconstruction of pottery since 1933 and has built up from sherds several hundred pots, including many fine decorated vessels which now make worthy additions to the museum collection.  She has continued this task all year round and through her perseverance and skill has surmounted many technical difficulties." 

In Book III Olga stated: "... and it is due to her great care and technical ability that the vessels are now fully restored".  And in the final volume, Olga highlighted Olive's ‘deep and personal interest in the repair and reconstruction of several hundred pots’. Olive worked unstintingly with Olga until the final production of the last volume (in 1954).  She had dedicated at least 21 years to this end. 
 
I don’t know the origins of how she got into the business of sticking pots together (though we believe Leslie may have procured the job at the Institute for her when he became Director of Lachish) but I feel she must have been doing it before this even when Leslie worked for Petrie as her handwriting is on description cards in the Petrie collection too.  She obviously had an eye for fine detail, and it also meant she was a godsend to the family when they had chinaware disasters! - her repairs were almost impossible to detect.
 
Olive’s eyesight had begun to deteriorate and she eventually retired to a Hotel in Folkestone for gentle folks – aptly named St. Olave’s! 

​I remember visiting her there and she proudly showing me her pristine set of the Lachish Books in the bookcase of the guest lounge. 
 
She passed away December 1977, aged 81.
 
And ending on a more amusing note:

Guest post by Caitlin R. O’Grady (UCL Institute of Archaeology)
 
Document, document, document.  That is the conservator’s mantra.
 
Often, documentation takes the form of before and after treatment photos, and/or staging images that describe active intervention. However, in the early decades of the profession, documentation was not a carefully followed tenant.
 
Where early records exist, they often are cursory and limited to brief paper notes. Therefore, it is the unexpected inclusion of active preservation in films digitised through Filming Antiquity which makes them extraordinary. In addition to documenting all aspects of archaeology, these films provide a snapshot of conservation and preservation of archaeological artefacts as practised in the field and laboratory between the 1930s and the 1960s.

Conservation in the field

Gerald Lankester Harding, James Leslie Starkey, Marjorie Rice and Olga Tufnell led excavations at Tell ed-Duweir as part of the Wellcome-Marston Expedition to the Near East between 1932 and 1938. During this period excavation photographer Ralph Richmond Brown produced a film, “Lachish – City of Judah”, to document the site and the process of excavation for a public audience.
 
Conservation activities including field consolidation (strengthening material by filling in pores), packing artefacts for transport and ceramic reconstruction are also recorded, highlighting the importance of preservation in archaeological enquiry. In this first sequence from “Lachish – City of Judah” a woman carefully applies molten wax to faunal remains (while smoking!) in order to preserve “these fragile bones for transport to England”.
 
Wax consolidation, a common practise in the field to aid transport of fragile archaeological remains, is well documented in early publications (e.g. Petrie 1904; Rathgen 1905; Droop 1915; Lucas 1924, Delougaz 1933; Plenderleith 1934). While invaluable during this early period, as supplies and chemicals were frequently impossible to procure in the field, wax causes staining and is difficult to remove, particularly when applied at excessively high temperatures.

Ione Gedye, founder of the Repair Department at the Institute of Archaeology (IoA), University of London, taught conservation from 1937 until her retirement in 1975. She discusses the use of wax and some of these very issues in the 1947 notes she prepared for Institute of Archaeology students on the treatment of archaeological artefacts in the field and laboratory.  
 
Gedye (1947: 10) writes, “in the field paraffin wax is often used to strengthen bones … in some cases the wax was put on too hot and penetrated so deeply that it could only be removed with difficulty”; she concludes “it is best to avoid the use of wax for bones, though an exception may be made in the case of paraffin wax bandages”. As conservators, we often find remnants of these treatments, but much more rarely can rely on photographic or written documentation describing the materials used for stabilisation.   
 
The film also documents reconstruction of ceramics recovered at Tell-ed Duweir. In the second sequence, a woman applies thick, dark adhesive to sherds allowing them to dry by propping them up and using gravity to aid tight joins – a technique I and many other conservators continue to use during fieldwork. After the vessel is completely reconstructed and adhesive dried, we see her making plaster fills to fill losses.
 
Despite not being able to see her face, it is likely that this is Olive Starkey, sister of James and sister-in-law of Marjorie. Olive was responsible for much of the restoration of finds on site and in London and she is directly thanked by Olga and colleagues for her work in the “repair and reconstruction of pottery since 1933” (Tufnell et al. 1940: 12). This practice was not uncommon; many wives and other female relations of archaeologists worked at “mending”, “sticking” and “restoring” artefacts in the field during this early period. The IoA hired Olive Starkey to work in the Repair Department in December 1945. In this capacity, she and Gedye taught students how to conserve recently excavated artefacts from Tell-ed Duweir as well as other sites.

An animation in “Electrolytic Treatment of Iron Objects”, an IoA film probably created in 1954/1955*, describes the chemical process by which chlorides (responsible for active corrosion) are removed from corroded metals during electrolysis. This technique is used in conservation to reduce corrosion through the application of an electric current through an ionic solution – in this case sodium hydroxide (NaOH). The resulting reaction reduces the corroded metal from an oxide and converts it back to a metal.

The animation is followed by a clip of Ione Gedye herself demonstrating this technique on iron artefacts in the laboratory. Critically, students are advised to control the treatment process by monitoring the presence of chlorides in soak water.  

Work is conducted in an open laboratory and without personal protective equipment such as gloves. As with the Lachish films, health and safety in the handling of chemicals is not a priority. While some steps utilise harsher chemicals and tools than we may use now, the approach as demonstrated is not very different from electrolytic methods used to treat metals today. 

Conservation in action

Professional photographer Maurice Cookson, former director of the IoA Photographic Department and author of the ground-breaking Photography for Archaeologists (1954), and Sheppard Frere, Professor of Archaeology of the Roman Empire at University of London created the film “Lifting a Mosaic Pavement” in 1957 to document the removal of an in situ mosaic and its subsequent treatment.  The mosaic was recovered in Building 3 of Insula XXVII at Verulamium, a Roman site in St. Albans, Hertfordshire.

All stages of the lifting and backing process are included, with intertitles discussing aspects of the treatment. In this clip from the film, we see the application of Corvic Q44/62 (a polyvinyl chloride adhesive) and cotton facing material, which are applied to safeguard mosaic tesserae during the lifting process. Following application of these materials, we see the process of undercutting and mosaic removal from its original find spot.

The film is interesting in that it documents the reflexive practice of conservation where process is assessed in real time and modified to better influence results. This is clear in the titles state that the use of solvent in removing the PVC adhesive was not as successful as removal without solvent.

We are fortunate that the mosaic lifting and backing procedure is further described in publication (Frere 1958) with specific information regarding the intervention materials using the lifting and backing processes including cement mortar recipes.

As Frere states (158: 116), discovery of the mosaic offered those involved the opportunity to develop a new method in collaboration with chemists working in industry. Treatments of this type are very destructive, and not as commonly utilised, but remain attractive to archaeologists interested in recovering coins and pottery in order to date the mosaic, as well as stratigraphic layers from earlier occupations.

However, the technique continues to have a place in salvage and rescue archaeology. For example, conservators and archaeologists used a similar approach (though with more stable conservation materials) to recover numerous Roman mosaics from Zeugma, located near Gaziantepe, Turkey, following the construction of the Birecik Dam on the Eurphrates River (Nardi & Schneider 2013).

These films offer an extraordinary glimpse into archaeological conservation as practised in the field and laboratory from the 1930s through to the 1960s. They connect the published literature and its translation into actual practice and are amazing documents of the field’s early history.  

I hope you have found these films as incredible as I have.  I would love to hear from anyone who participated in filming during this period at the IoA, or saw these films while studying or working at the Institute.  Please get in touch to share your perspective and memories!

*The film is referenced in an IoA annual report from 1956 (IoA 1956: 7).

References/Further Reading
Delougaz, P. 1915. The Treatment of Clay Tablets in the Field. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, no. 7, ed. James Henry Breasted, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 39-57.

Droop, J.P. 1915. Archaeological Excavation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Frere, S. 1958. Lifting Mosaics. Antiquity 32 (126): 116-119.

Gedye, I. 1947. Notes on the Treatment of Archaeological Objects in the Field & the Laboratory. For the Use of Students of the Institute – Not For Publication. Unpublished course notes. University of London, Institute of Archaeology.

Gedye, I. 1953. Report of the Technical Department. In Ninth Annual Report. London University of London Institute of Archaeology, pp. 6.

Lucas, A. 1924. Antiques - Their Restoration and Preservation. London: E. Arnold & Co.

Nardi, R. and Schneider, K. 2013. Site Conservation during the Rescue Excavations. In Excavations at Zeugma. Ed. W. Aylward. Los Altos, California: The Packard Humanities Institute, pp. 55-70.

O’Grady, C.R. expected 2017. Gentlewomen in the Field and Museum: Unacknowledged Pioneers in the Development of Conservation as both Profession and University Discipline – the London Case. In Engaging Conservation: Collaboration Across Disciplines. Eds. Lynn Grant, Julia Lawson, Nina Owczarek. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum.

Petrie, W.M.F. 1904.  Methods & Aims in Archaeology. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited (New York: The Macmillan Company).

Plenderleith, H.J. 1934. The Preservation of Antiquities. London: The Museums Association.

Rathgen, F. 1905. The Preservation of Antiquities – A Handbook for Curators. trans. George A. Auden and Harold A. Auden, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tufnell, O., Inge, C.H, and Harding, L. 1940. Lachish II (Tell ed Duweir). The Fosse Temple. London: Oxford University Press.

University of London Institute of Archaeology. 1956. Report of the Photographic Department. Twelfth Annual Report. London: University of London Institute of Archaeology pp 7.

University of London Institute of Archaeology. 1959. Report of the Director for the Session 1957-58. Fifteenth Annual Report. Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology 2: 72-84.