Peggy Guido facts for kids

Cecily Margaret Guido, also known as Peggy Piggott, was a famous English archaeologist. She studied prehistory, which is the time before written records. Peggy was also a specialist in studying ancient objects found during digs.

Her career in British archaeology lasted for sixty years. She was known for her excellent digging methods and for quickly publishing her findings. Peggy wrote over 50 articles and books from the 1930s to the 1990s. She did important research on ancient settlements like hillforts and roundhouses. She also studied burial traditions and ancient objects, especially glass beads from the Iron Age to the Anglo-Saxon period.

Early Life

Peggy Guido was born Cecily Margaret Preston on August 5, 1912, in Beckenham, Kent, England. Her father was a wealthy engineer. The family lived in a large, twenty-room house called Wood Lodge. This house was located near an old Roman road.

When Peggy was eight, her father sadly drowned. Her mother later remarried, and Peggy was raised by her aunt.

Education and Early Career

As a child, Peggy was very interested in Roman coins. When she was a young woman, she started digging with famous archaeologists Mortimer Wheeler and Tessa Verney Wheeler. On her 21st birthday in 1933, she was digging at the Roman town of Verulamium. Peggy really admired Tessa Wheeler and later dedicated one of her books to her.

From 1935 to 1936, Peggy studied archaeology at the UCL Institute of Archaeology in London. She earned a special diploma in Western European Prehistory. Here, she met her first husband, Stuart Piggott. They got married on November 12, 1936.

Early Digs and Discoveries

Sutton Hoo Helmet Reconstructed

Peggy started her archaeology career by working on sites from the Early Iron Age. She helped write reports on important digs, like one at Southcote in 1937. The next year, she published findings about pottery from Iron Age Theale.

From 1938 to 1939, she worked on the first big research dig by The Prehistoric Society. This was at Little Woodbury in Wiltshire, an important Early Iron Age site. She also worked with Gerhard Bersu, who greatly influenced her. In 1939, Peggy published about another Early Iron Age site at Langton Matravers in Dorset. Her work greatly increased what was known about this early period.

Peggy was a very skilled excavator. She was involved in the famous dig of the Anglo-Saxon boat burial at Sutton Hoo in 1939. This was a very important discovery.

Bronze Age Research

Most of Peggy's own digs focused on the Bronze Age. In 1937, at just 25 years old, she led her first dig. It was at a Middle Bronze Age burial mound and cemetery called Latch Farm in Hampshire. Her report on this dig helped add many new cremation urns to the list of known artifacts from that time.

In the 1940s, Peggy was very busy, publishing about two articles each year. She wrote for national journals and regional societies. During this time, she published about several important Bronze Age sites. These included Bronze Age enclosures in Wiltshire, like the well-known hilltop site of Ram's Hill in Berkshire. She also studied stone circles in Dorset and excavated eighteen burial mounds in Hampshire and Wiltshire.

Later in the 1940s, Peggy started focusing on the Late Bronze Age. She also began writing special reports on artifacts, especially Late Bronze Age metalwork. She created a detailed study of British razors and reported on a metal hoard from Blackrock in Sussex. She also studied individual artifacts and a Late Bronze Age burial in Fife. This is when she started her special interest in glass beads.

Major Contributions

Hillfort Excavations

In the late 1940s, Peggy received funding to study Iron Age settlements in southern Scotland. She wanted to test new ideas about how settlements developed. This was a big step forward in understanding ancient settlements.

She excavated three upland hillforts: Hownam Rings (1948), Hayhope Knowe (1949), and Bonchester Hill (1950). She published her findings for each site in the same year she dug them. Her work helped create a timeline for later prehistoric settlements in southern Scotland. This was very important before radiocarbon dating was used in archaeology.

Peggy was one of the most important British prehistorians in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She excavated at least six hillforts. Her work on hillforts is considered some of her most important. Hownam Rings became a key example for how hillforts developed, a model still used today. She also worked with her husband on her sixth hillfort dig, Braidwood Fort, from 1951 to 1955.

Roundhouse Discoveries

Peggy's work also helped create the modern understanding of roundhouses. Her drawing of the Hayhope roundhouse became the standard. Her digs at Hayhope and Hownam also suggested that there could be different types of prehistoric houses. Other archaeologists, like Richard Feachem and George Jobey, were greatly influenced by her work.

Because of her important contributions to British prehistory, Peggy was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1944, when she was 32. She also became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1946.

Understanding Ancient Life

By the early 1950s, Peggy was already trying to understand the daily lives of people in prehistory. She carefully recorded where objects were found and thought about how they were used. Her digging strategies and work on hillforts and roundhouses helped start modern studies of ancient settlements.

Between 1951 and 1953, while still working in Scotland, she also published about several English sites. These included the hilltop site of Carl Wark near Sheffield. She also worked on the Dorchester-on-Thames Neolithic complex in Oxfordshire, which was important for understanding henge monuments. She worked with R.J.C. Atkinson and Nancy Sanders on this.

Peggy also worked on an Iron Age burial mound in Hampshire that she had dug during the war. At this point, she started focusing on wetland archaeology. She did one of her most technically difficult digs at the crannog site of Milton Loch in Dumfries and Galloway. Here, she found a well-preserved timber roundhouse, which she published about in 1953.

Later Work and Italian Archaeology

Peggy published one of her last field reports on British prehistory in 1954. She then moved to Sicily and briefly used her maiden name, Preston. She helped translate a book called Sicily before the Greeks with her second husband, Luigi Guido.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, she wrote four guidebooks about Italian archaeology. These covered Sardinia (1963), Syracuse (1965), Sicily (1967), and southern Italy (1972). She also reviewed Italian archaeological works for the British journal Antiquity.

Glass Beads Research

Peggy returned to archaeology in the 1970s and focused on researching glass beads. She traveled around Britain to see excavated examples and those in museums. In 1978, she published her first book on ancient British glass beads. This book covered both prehistoric and Roman periods. After this, she started working on her Anglo-Saxon bead book.

She helped start the Bead Study Trust in 1981 and the Peggy Guido Fund for Research on Beads. From the 1970s onwards, she wrote many special reports on beads from various sites. Her bead research even involved her driving a camper van across Europe in the 1980s! Her book on Anglo-Saxon beads was published after her death in 1999. Both of her bead books are still the main reference works on the topic.

Museum Work

In 1977, Peggy moved to Devizes and became involved with Devizes Museum, now called the Wiltshire Museum. At 70, she returned to prehistoric field archaeology. She published a new study of the Inner Enclosure at Figsbury Rings in Wiltshire with Isobel Smith in 1982. She also surveyed Cow Down at Longbridge Deverill to check for damage from plowing. In 1984, she was elected Vice President of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society.

Personal Life

On November 12, 1936, Margaret married archaeologist Stuart Piggott. They had met while studying archaeology in London. Their marriage ended in 1954, and they divorced in 1956. In 1957, she married Luigi Guido, whom she met in Sicily.

In her later years, Peggy cared for A. W. Lawrence, a classical scholar. After his wife died in 1986, Lawrence lived with Margaret until his death in 1991. In her final years, Margaret often visited her first husband, Stuart Piggott. In 1987, they both became Presidents of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society.

Margaret Guido passed away in a hospital in Bath on September 8, 1994.

Legacy

Peggy Guido's name lives on through Margaret Guido's Charitable Trust. This trust gives money to charities, especially those involved with the arts. A gift from her helped the National Trust buy the land around Silbury Hill in Wiltshire.

The Wiltshire Museum in Devizes has some of her finds and tools.

Peggy Guido is an important character in the 2007 novel The Dig, written by her nephew, John Preston. She is played by Lily James in the film based on the book, which came out on Netflix in 2021.

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  Sutton Hoo Helmet Reconstructed