Peggy Guido
Her career in British archaeology spanned sixty years, and she is recognised for her field methods, her field-leading research into prehistoric settlements (hillforts and roundhouses), burial traditions, and artefact studies (particularly Iron Age to Anglo-Saxon glass beads), as well as her high-quality and rapid publication, contributing more than 50 articles and books to her field between the 1930s and 1990s.
[3][4] The family home was a twenty-room mansion, Wood Lodge, in West Wickham, on the line of a Roman road.
[8] In 1939, Guido published a further Early Iron Age site at Langton Matravers (Dorset), greatly enhancing knowledge of a period that by then had only just begun to be elucidated.
[10] Guido was awarded funding in the late 1940s by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland to test the model of Iron Age settlement development in southern Scotland in response to a Council for British Archaeology policy statement regarding the misleading nature of settlement classification from surface remains.
Although Little Woodbury had been successful in exposing an Early Iron Age roundhouse, the report had been remarkably inconclusive with respect to its reconstruction.
Guido simplified this in line with the earlier Northumbrian work of Wake and Kilbride-Jones, which went on to influence Brewster at Staple Howe.
The Hayhope-Hownam excavations also suggested the potential for a typology of prehistoric houses – as later undertaken by Richard Feachem and George Jobey, both greatly influenced by Guido's work.
It was at this point that she turned her attention to wetland archaeology and arguably her most technically skilled excavation: the crannog site of Milton Loch (Dumfries and Galloway), with its well-preserved timber roundhouse (published in 1953).
Guido produced one of her final field reports for British prehistory in 1954 – a note on ceramics from a dun (on Tiree) – in the year that her relationship with Stuart ended.
Returning to archaeology, in the 1970s, Guido settled down to researching glass beads and traveled around Britain to see excavated examples as well as those in museums.
[10] From the 1970s onwards, she produced dozens of specialist reports on beads (for sites including Lankhills Winchester, Colchester, Wilsford, Cadbury-Congresbury, Conderton Camp, Castle Copse – with many more not yet in print).
[6] At the age of 70, she turned her attention again to prehistoric field archaeology, publishing a reconsideration of the Inner Enclosure at Figsbury Rings, Wiltshire with Isobel Smith (in 1982) and conducting a fieldwalking survey of Cow Down[19] at Longbridge Deverill with Eve Machin (in 1982–83), to assess plough damage.
[2] Her archaeological career spanned sixty years and was defined by high field standards, and rapid, high-quality publication.
In addition to her own research during World War II, Guido directed numerous rescue excavations for the Ancient Monuments Department of the Ministry of Works, on sites commandeered for defence purposes.
[20] On 12 November 1936, Margaret married the archaeologist Stuart Piggott (1910–1996); they had met while students at the Institute of Archaeology in London.
[25] In 1987, Piggott had joined Margaret in shared tenure as President of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society – offices they each held until their deaths.
Her name lives on in Margaret Guido's Charitable Trust, administered by Coutts of the Strand, which provides grants to charities and voluntary bodies, largely those to do with the arts.
[27] Guido is given a prominent role in a 2007 novel on the subject of the Sutton Hoo excavation, The Dig, written by her nephew, John Preston.
