One box of archive down and I cannot help but feel, well, surprised. Surprised at how fruitful this project is already turning out to be in terms of the joy experienced in rummaging through old ‘stuff’ and the amount of incredibly useful information the OUAS is gaining as a result. Slowly, we will begin to fill in the (numerous) gaps in the history of our society. Some of these gaps relate to the foundations, the very bare bones of a history: names, dates and places. For example, using the membership books, minute books and other administrative documents we can now exactly reconstruct a full chronology detailing past presidents, members and excavation projects that were carried out over much of the last century.
What delights me so much about working on the archive however is being in what I conceptualise as a position of privilege. I say this because through the process of archiving, I am gaining a sense of the real lives of these people, or at least one aspect of their lives which pertained to their enthusiastic pursual of all things archaeological. What has come across immediately is the passion and commitment thrown into happenings, and I am excited to attain a richer understanding of the past experiences of these young committee members. A certain fascination with the lives of others (or what some may call nosiness) is a typical characteristic of anyone attracted by the fields of archaeology or anthropology.
Many of our discoveries this week were of a different form to the usual stacks of papers (see images). I was thrilled to find a large box containing finds (mostly pottery) from an excavation at a site north of St. Mary’s church, Kidlington, along with an envelope containing splendid black and white photos of the trenches which had been dug by OUAS members and an extensive report detailing the finds and results of the dig. There is much unpublished material from both surveys and excavations carried out by OUAS and we fully intend to explore the possibility of publishing some of this information. We also realised that the HEIR project is in the possession of lantern slides containing images of OUAS members digging on certain sites and we look forward to utilising this as a supplementary source to the archive itself. We also found what are labelled as termcards stored on floppy disks (remember those!?). We are itching to see if the termcards have been preserved, however our first major challenge will be hunting down technology in the University capable of reading them!
Bits and pieces of the archives so far have conveyed a certain humour and warmth, outlining the paticular customs and traditions which used to be so central the society. For example, the President used to be required to give their own lecture (in place of what would normally be the invited speaker) as the last event of the term. We found a copy of a previous President’s speech (brave soul!) which we are hoping to identify the author of.
A large proportion of what we have leafed through so far has taken the form of correspondence which is inherently of a highly personal nature. From this we can see how interrelated the committee used to be with other local archaeological groups, present and past members and academics working in the archaeology and heritage fields.
What has emerged is that at some point during the 2000s, there was an epic lapse in communication during the hand-down to a new committee and knowledge of what the OUAS were supposed to be doing was lost. We are desperate to find out why and when exactly this happened. Some of our key questions are: why did we stop excavating and going on excursions? Why did we not know that we had an archive? Why were we not aware of the highly important role of the Senior Members (academics who used to be there to step in should a speaker cancel, and work with the student committee in general) or the extensive social and professional networks we had spent decades cultivating? Essentially, we want to know why so much seems to have been lost, in such a short period of time. If you were a member of the society during the late 1990s or 2000s, we would especially like to hear from you if you have any information regarding the state of affairs within the society at this time.
I would love to hear from you, so please email me at: katharine.allen@spc.ox.ac.uk
OUAS IT Rep and Archivist,
Katy Allen
OUAS Archives Project 