Waechter-Higgs Collection
Scope and Contents
A collection of articles, offprints, magazines, photographs and site reports from the personal collections of archaeologists John Waechter and Eric Higgs. The collection is mainly concerned with Palaeolithic archaeology, but this broadens to include zoology, botany, ethnography, palaeoanthropology and African archaeology. The collection is composed of two formerly separate archives, one curated by John Waechter, and the other by E.S. Higgs.
The collection is precious on two levels: superficially, it is a valuable source of information about hundreds of sites, artefacts and specimens in a broad area of archaeology. Also included are reviews of books, museums and conferences, details of fieldwork plans and discussions of the current state of archaeological theory at the time of writing. There are articles of landmark importance from such luminaries as Breuil, Kenyon, Garrod and Peyrony, and others that are rare or obscure. Included are Leakey's first publications and a hand-typed press release from Johanson's discovery of Lucy in 1974. As a documentary of archaeological work in the past 150 years the collection is remarkably complete.
On a deeper level, the collection forms a unique record of the development of a young discipline over virtually its entire history. One can see the changes developing through the beginning of archaeology as a university subject, through the New Archaeology of the 1970s and the environmentalism of the 1980s. Earlier material refers to quaint theories long since discarded, such as denial of the antiquity of humans and Piltdown Man. These are apparent both from formal articles and from the numerous clippings from popular newspapers of the time. Many of these include political influences: there are British Government documents detailing the breakdown of the Empire; United States Government publications from the 1920s advocating eugenics, and reports from the Soviet Union in the 1930s on attempts to educate Siberian nomadic peoples in order to challenge the cultural snobbery of the Western European nations.
The Waechter-Higgs Collection was the subject of a HEFCE Follett Award in 1995, which resulted in a searchable database jointly created by the Department of Archaeology and the University Library.
Dates
- Creation: 1848 - 1976
Creator
- Waechter, John d'Arcy, 1915 - 1978 (Person)
- Higgs, Eric Sidney, 1908 - 1976 (Person)
Conditions Governing Access
Available to all researchers, by appointment
Copyright
According to individual document
Biographical / Historical
John Waechter was Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, in Palaeolithic Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology in London from the 1950s to the 1970s. Through personal contacts the Department of Archaeology and Prehistory at the University of Sheffield acquired his extensive collection of offprints after his death in the late 1970s. The collection includes a large corpus of work back to the 1880s, and is exceptional because of its time-depth and breadth of coverage. The collection is especially strong on the British and European palaeolithic between 1900 and 1960, but also includes much rare material on East and South Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, China, and the Far East. It covers most of the key journal accounts of palaeolithic excavations and fieldwork in Britain and Europe between 1900 and 1960, and much of the key palaeolithic research that took place in that period in Africa and Asia.
E.S. Higgs was Assistant and later Deputy Director of Research in the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University in the 1960s until his death in 1976, when the Department of Archaeology and Prehistory at Sheffield University acquired his collection of offprints. The main areas of interest are prehistoric subsistence, the late palaeolithic to the neolithic, and the origins of agriculture in Europe and the Near East. The collection includes a high proportion of the articles that were published on prehistoric subsistence, archaeozoology and archaeobotany worldwide between 1960 and 1976.
Extent
59 Box(es)
Language of Materials
English
Arrangement
By subject
Custodial History
Transferred from the Department of Archaeology to University of Sheffield Library in 2015
Topical
- Description rules
- International Standard for Archival Description - General
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
Repository Details
Part of the Special Collections and Archives Repository
Western Bank Library
University of Sheffield
Western Bank
Sheffield South Yorkshire S10 2TN United Kingdom
+44 (0) 114 222 7299
lib-special@sheffield.ac.uk