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THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 



Yet despite these undoubted achievements 

 Maud Cunnington is now a forgotten figure outside 

 Wiltshire, and even within Wiltshire her 

 contribution to archaeology has perhaps been 

 undervalued. This paper is intended to reassess her 

 contribution to Wiltshire archaeology and also to 

 demonstrate how personal reactions, as much as 

 archaeological criticisms, colour the way we 

 interpret the work of past practitioners. 



The problem with the criticisms of Maud 

 Cunnington is that so few appear in print; Wheeler's 

 mild comments on An Introduction to the 

 Archaeology ofWiltshire (Cunnington 1933a) were 

 the only ones made during her lifetime (see below). 

 It is for this reason that emphasis has been placed 

 on the censures voiced by Pitts (2000). Nowhere 

 else is there a published critique of Maud 

 Cunnington's work and techniques; everything else 

 is ephemeral, based on hearsay and received 

 opinion. People who never met Maud Cunnington 

 react in horror to her name. While those that did 

 know her, for example Peggy Guido and Stuart 

 Piggott, described her as 'terrible' or 'horrible', 

 when pressed as to how this awfulness manifested 

 itself very little information was forthcoming. One 

 would expect such a dreadful reputation to stem 

 from an incident or series of incidents and yet Stuart 

 Piggott merely recalled her 'icy blue eyes and icy 

 blue voice' (pers. comm.). Alexander Keiller's 

 personal and professional animosity recorded in his 

 correspondence is referred to by Murray (1999, 

 108, 121) and Pitts (2000, 45), but neither of these 

 authors refer to the complimentary letters that 

 Keiller sent to Mrs Cunnington praising her work 

 and erudition (e.g. Alexander Keiller Museum ref. 

 8805128), which ensures that only one side of the 

 story is heard. 



The main difficulty is that Maud Cunnington 

 has no voice of her own. There is no personal archive 

 like that of Keiller to consult. Cunnington's voice 

 comes from her obituaries and the memoirs of her 

 family, but it is such a quiet voice, one that barely 

 reflects her and only really reflects her work. She 

 has, in effect, been silenced. While this paper cannot 

 give her back her voice, it is an attempt to provide a 

 broader picture of her life and work. 



This paper is not intended as an exhaustive 

 account of Maud Cunnington's work, partly 

 because of the sheer volume of her work (Appendix 

 2). Rather than approaching this subject from an 

 archaeological standpoint, here an attempt is made 

 to assess her life in more general historical terms. 

 Because the criticisms of Cunnington have focussed 



on her excavation techniques, this paper 

 concentrates on her excavation reports rather than 

 her syntheses such as 'Romano-British Wiltshire' 

 (Cunnington 1930b). The archaeology of the sites 

 in question has been examined only where it 

 contributes to the more general argument. 

 Therefore Manton Barrow is discussed as the first 

 excavation with which she was involved; Oliver's 

 Camp because of the development of her style and 

 the inclusion of an explicit research strategy; All 

 Cannings Cross, the excavation which brought her 

 the most renown; and Woodhenge because of the 

 criticism it has subsequently received. 



LIFE 



Maud Cunnington was born in 1869. She was one 

 of seven children, the youngest daughter of Dr 

 Charles Pegge and Catherine Leach, and the grand- 

 daughter of R.V. Leach, the owner of Devizes 

 Castle. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies 

 College, one of the few schools at the time to offer 

 an academic education for girls (Vicinus 1985, 169). 

 We are told by Cunnington family memoirs (R.H. 

 Cunnington 1954; E. Cunnington n.d.) that Maud 

 became interested in archaeology only through her 

 husband and son who were following in the family 

 antiquarian tradition which had begun with Colt 

 Hoare's collaborator William Cunnington, and had 

 continued through following generations. From the 

 inception of theWANHS in 1853 there was rarely, 

 if ever, a time when the committee was without a 

 Cunnington representative. In 1887 Ben 

 Cunnington's father Henry had died and Ben had 

 taken over the running not only of the family 

 business but also the role of honorary curator of 

 the Wiltshire Society's museum in Devizes. Yet this 

 does not really explain why Maud Cunnington 

 became an archaeologist. Her own family seems to 

 have had a strong interest in history. Her sister Elsie 

 was an historian and married Jack Allen, the 

 Professor of History at Bedford College, while her 

 brother Ernest was an expert on the Vikings and 

 Viking Sagas. Maud Cunnington herself had 

 originally been interested in church architecture 

 (R.H. Cunnington. 1954, 228), but how this 

 translated into more secular concerns is not 

 addressed by her obituarists or biographers. 



Following their marriage in 1 889 Ben and Maud 

 Cunnington forged an archaeological partnership 

 that dominated Wiltshire for fifty years. Not only 

 did Maud become involved in Ben's curatorial work, 



