Breaking New Ground

This article explores archaeological programmes on the BBC between 1922 and 1939 through an entangled approach to broadcast and printed talks. Supported by archival sources and programme schedules in The Radio Times and The Listener, it focuses on the intertwined archaeological, broadcasting and publishing careers of Charles Leonard Woolley based on his excavation at Ur in southern Iraq. This highlights the important place archaeology held in the interwar listening and reading market with the BBC offering high fees for a popular speaker. Incorporating periodical studies and aspects of book history demonstrates the importance of an integrated approach to media history to further our understanding of the relationship between media, science and the public.


Introduction
1922 was an exciting year for British archaeologists: Howard Carter and his team discovered the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt; John Marshall began excavations at Mohenjo-Daro in India, the importance of which had first been recognised by R. D. Banerji; Charles Leonard Woolley began his excavations at Ur in southern Iraq (then a British Mandate); and at home in Britain, Alexander Keiller and O. G. S. Crawford undertook their pioneering aerial survey of southwest England, the first of its kind. 1 These and other discoveries featured almost daily in British newspapers and magazines, and archaeologists enjoyed great success in the popular book market. 2Archaeologists were shrewd publicizers of their discoveries, feeding the public's seemingly endless appetite for entertainment and distraction at a time of great political and personal upheaval and uncertainty. 3At the same time, they were working hard to be recognised as a profession and an academic discipline (and a science), denoting a shift away from the gentlemanly amateur antiquarians of the previous century towards an exclusive, prestigious field with jealously guarded borders.
As readers of this journal will of course know, 1922 also marked the year of the successful launch of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC).Science talks, as Allan Jones has shown, helped provide the required legitimation and respectability the young organisation needed to firmly establish itself in the ears and minds of the listening public. 4The following exploration of archaeology on the BBC between 1922 and 1939 builds on Jones's work and expands his arguments regarding the mutual legitimisation conducted by BBC staff and scientists (which many archaeologists were aspiring to be) by the example of archaeology talks from 1922 to 1939. 5 More specifically, we will look at the broadcasting career of Charles Leonard Woolley (1880-1960), one of the most successful popularisers of archaeological fieldwork of the twentieth century, who began broadcasting in 1924.His negotiations over fees and his fluctuating popularity with the BBC Talks Department allow us to chart not only his personal popularity on the airwaves, but also gives us an insight into the importance the Department placed on associating itself with those its staff perceived to be respected and established scientists and representatives of a dynamic new discipline.

Entangled Aspects of Broadcasting
As Marie Cronqvist and Christoph Hilgert have explained (concerning media content), 'entanglements may be identified with regard to the communicated news, topics, narratives and discourses, focussing on flows of content across different media products, formats, genres, channels or outlets … ' 6 In this article I will thus work with archival material, programme schedules and articles in The Radio Times and The Listener, and lecture series re-published as books to explore these connections, which are important sources in the absence of surviving recordings from the period. 7his 'integrated approach to media history' can help redress some of the artificial separation of media in scholarly approaches to studying periodicals, broadcasting or popular book publishing in isolation. 8Both to the BBC and its lecturers, the interconnection between the spoken and the printed word was of great importance.In her thesis on broadcasting magazines, Julia Taylor emphasises the value placed by the BBC on the legitimisation of the broadcast word through print. 9Due to the initial refusal of newspapers to print the schedule, the BBC recognised the importance of publishing its own magazine, especially as the sales and advertising revenue derived from this output did not have to be shared with the Post Office, who issued the broadcasting licence.During the early years, the BBC deliberately avoided regular programming slots in order to stimulate listeners and prevent 'lazy' listening, rendering it essential to secure the audience's access to programme listings in advance of broadcasting. 10The Radio Times, published from September 1923, is therefore an important intermedial primary source, not only for the listings, but also for articles announcing upcoming lectures and excerpts of talks after broadcasting that were occasionally published in the magazine before the launch of The Listener in 1929.With an initial price of 2d., The Radio Timesand later The Listener, also initially priced at 2d.,moreover reached audiences without access to radio sets. 11peakers often published their talks in book or pamphlet form to great success, and with its own magazines the BBC tapped into this market.Under its first editor, Richard S. Lambert, The Listener worked closely with the Talks Department and aimed to produce 'more than a guide, or reference book', but rather 'a literary product'. 12Book reviews, previews and other articles were thus published in addition to the talks to merit this distinction.However, according to Debra Cohen, The Listener as a publication occupies an awkward place in scholarship.Its status as a depository for broadcast content has led to scholarly neglect of this magazine (despite a 62-year run) and thus a BREAKING NEW GROUND.C. LEONARD WOOLLEY'S ARCHAEOLOGY TALKS ON THE  BBC, 1922-1939  lack of contextual positioning within the wider periodicals landscape.Nevertheless, it is precisely this intermedial status as an archive, supplement, promotional pamphlet or Baedeker of spoken material that makes it so valuable for an entangled approach to media and science communication. 13

Archaeological Programmes
Similar to broadcasting, archaeology, especially in a colonial or imperial context, has been described as an expression of modernity due to its entanglement with nation-building and the creation and maintaining of imperialist and colonialist regimes from the nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth century. 14In South-West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), the French and British Mandates over Syria and Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine and Transjordan, created after the First World War, provided archaeologists (many of whom had been instrumental in drawing the borders of these new nation-states) with unprecedented access to the sites and material cultures of a vast range of human and hominid pasts. 15International collaboration and communication within the discipline, across disciplines and with other audiences (public or government and funding bodies) were key factors in these developments, reflecting the internationalist spirit of the interwar period. 16These stimuli proved galvanising for archaeology as a discipline and contributed significantly to developments in fieldwork, recording, and conservation methods, as well as publishing practices, as archaeologists had to demonstrate the relevance of their work to these diverse audiences.They thus learnt to communicate with the public through popular channels such as radio lectures, building on a long-established tradition of writing newspaper and magazine articles or books, or by opening their sites up as visitor attractions selling postcards and even small artefacts as souvenirs. 17s a comprehensive study of archaeology on the BBC (also in a context of wider scientific programming) is beyond the remit of this article, I will here provide a brief overview of the geographical distribution of the subjects of archaeological programmes to give a context for the detailed discussion of Leonard Woolley's talks.This analysis is based on keyword searches on the BBC's Programme Index, an issue-by-issue review of The Radio Times (southern edition, 28 September 1923 to January 1940) and The Listener (January 1929 to January 1940) in order to reflect the entanglement of various media formats. 18he absence of recordings or published transcripts in many cases complicates identifying the geographical focus of archaeological programmes based purely on the name of the speaker and the title given in the listings.If we do, however, limit ourselves to talks using the term 'archaeologist' in the programme description, supported by the evidence of published talks, either in The Radio Times or The Listener, it is possible to paint a broad picture of archaeological output for the period, with an average of six to seven talks delivered by archaeologists per year (Table 1).This shows that Europe and certain parts of the Eastern Mediterranean (EM) and SWANA regions were represented strongly, whereas the majority of British Empire territory (e.g.India, sub-Saharan Africa, New Zealand, Australia) as well as the Americas were entirely absent. 19he majority of the talks about Europe focused on the British Isles, which of course is hardly surprising for a British-based institution.More interestingly, many of these talks were explicitly aimed a holidaymakers, especially during the summer. 20A regional approach to archaeology on the BBC would, I believe, contribute much to our understanding of public engagement with the national past and would highlight further ways in which archaeology is entangled with tourism and national identity. 21Outside of Europe, Egypt was one of the most popular destinations for interwar tourists from Europe and America, fuelled by the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. 22Yet despite the interwar period's well-explored enchantment with all things ancient Egyptian, archaeology in Egypt received curiously little attention on the BBC. 23The intense press attention after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 is not reflected in programming, even though the contract between the funder of the excavation and The Times for exclusive access to coverage of the excavation and emptying of the tomb did not specifically reference broadcasting. 24his gap in the engagement with ancient Egypt is furthermore reflected by the lack of articles in The Radio Times and The Listener and is certainly remarkable in view of 'Tutmania' and the persistent fascination with Ancient Egypt in the West in general.
Other areas of the Eastern Mediterranean and SWANA regions also experienced a particularly high volume of archaeological excavations in the interwar period.Accessible, yet Other, the 'cradle of (Western) civilization' and the birthplace of monotheistic religions and classical culture, excavations in Greece, Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, Palestine and Transjordan, and Iraq played a decisive role in the development of archaeology in the interwar period.In Greece, the foreign Schools had dominated archaeology before the War, but their activities were significantly curbed throughout the interwar period, whereas the Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923, welcomed foreign archaeologists after an initial period of political instability. 25In the remainder of this article we will now turn to Leonard Woolley's excavation in Mandatory Iraq as his twenty broadcasts out of a total of twenty-five for the period make up the bulk of coverage for this region. 26ble 1.Geographical distribution of 103 archaeology talks, 1924-1939. a 'Merely an Admirable Fieldworker … ' The excavation Woolley led at Ur lasted from 1922 to 1934, and was funded mainly by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.Once one of the larger cities of southern Mesopotamia, Ur (c.200 miles southeast of Baghdad) was inhabited from at least the fifth millennium BCE until c. 500 BCE. 27Although Woolley's excavation was pioneering in many aspects, the Royal Cemetery (mid-third millennium BC), excavated between 1927 and 1929, remains the most famous discoveryalthough not with such a long afterlife as Tutankhamunmainly for the thousands of pieces of jewellery and other precious finds and the evidence of human sacrifice. 28Woolley had had speaking engagements on the BBC before this discovery, but his popularity as a lecturer hinged on the public sensation caused by this remarkable find and his successful publicising through newspapers, magazines, books, public lectures, exhibitions and radio talks. 29he following discussion of Woolley's twenty talks between 1924 and 1937 and the fees he was able to negotiate for them thus provide a good comparison to other science lecturers, as detailed by Jones, who lists twenty broadcasts by physicist Arthur Thomson between 1925 and 1932 and over fifteen by Oliver Lodge between 1923 and 1934. 30oolley certainly stands out as one of the most prolific archaeology lecturers during the interwar period and one of only a few archaeologists active in this region to broadcast at all (Table 2).As Woolley's contributor file at the BBC Written Archives Centre begins in 1925, we don't know how the relationship was initiated for his first broadcasts in the summer of 1924. 31An article in The Radio Times promoted his upcoming three talks on his excavations at Ur and the neighbouring site of Tell al-'Ubaid. 32As the table shows, all of his talks were clustered in the summer months, due to the seasonal character of fieldwork.Excavations in southern Iraq were conducted between November and April as summers were too hot and the labourers excavations relied on were not available due to the harvesting and grazing seasons.The London summer season thus coincided well with the migratory pattern of archaeological work in the EM and SWANA regions and many archaeologists mounted exhibitions (private or in their funding institutions) of their finds during that time, and reviewed the year's work for listeners. 33Only occasionally were there talks such as the one on 25 September 1929, looking forward to a new excavation season.According to Woolley people often asked him about the preparations for a new season, and the talk therefore was perhaps less about the results he expected but rather about the purchasing and shipping of supplies, or staff and travel arrangements. 34p until the summer of 1927 Woolley's talks lasted for the then standard 15 min, but when Hilda Matheson wrote to Woolley in 1928 to suggest another talk, Richard Lambert, then head of the Adult Education Section, proposed a talk of 45 min instead (resulting in a fee of 30 guineas at the going rate of 10 guineas for a 15-minute talk).According to Lambert, listeners now seemed to like longer talks, denoting a change in the BBC's assumptions on the attention span of listeners. 35It also speaks to both Woolley's and his topic's popularity as the length of talks in general continued to vary considerably. 36his is furthermore evident in the range of audiences Woolley addressed: The broadcast on 11 April 1933 sat between early evening musical contributions, whereas on 7 May 1935 Woolley addressed Sixth Forms and on 25 June 1937 The 'Children's Hour'.Most of Woolley's talks were broadcast during various time slots.The basis for this decision is not always clear from the archival evidence but seems to have depended on a number of factors such as the content, the intended audience as well as which BBC departments were involved in planning the talk (Adult Education, Talks, Education) and other programmes scheduled on the day.
Public interest in the Ur project rose significantly with the excavation of the Royal Cemetery in early 1927, and especially in 1928 with further discoveries of mass human sacrifice.This coincided with the appointment of Hilda Matheson as the director of the Talks Department in 1926, whose legacy was felt long after her departure in 1931. 37Credited with developing 'the intimate mode of address' the Talks Department under Matheson spent much time coaching lecturers in their delivery and 'promoted writing "for the ear"'.Insisting on manuscripts to be approved by the Department in advance of lectures, Matheson developed a 'new softer tone of radio talking', reflecting 'the incorporation of radio into the domestic sphere'. 38The close scripting of talks furthermore helped the production flow of The Listener, as it intended to publish talks as soon as possible after broadcasting.
In 1928 and 1929 Woolley published two popular books about the Ur excavations, both of which sold well for their respective publishers. 39Much of the information therein had already been communicated to the public through newspapers, radio talks, and in a scholarly forum via the preliminary annual excavation reports, published in the BREAKING NEW GROUND.C. LEONARD WOOLLEY'S ARCHAEOLOGY TALKS ON THE  BBC, 1922-1939  Antiquaries Journal.Lecturing tours in Britain and the United States contributed to Leonard and his wife Katharine Woolley's public standing and form yet another (although more ephemeral) strand of this entangled communication of archaeology. 40Yet despite all this publicity, the excavation was chronically cash-strapped. 41Woolley repeatedly asked for appeals for private contributions to the excavation, notices of public lectures he was delivering in London, or the opening of the exhibition at the British Museum to be mentioned in The Radio Times, to which J.C. Stobart somewhat grudgingly agreed, as long it was made clear that the appeal was for the British Museum as the excavation's funding institution and not for Woolley himself. 42Alongside his successful publicising of Ur through newspapers and other magazines, he thus made full use of the entanglements of talks with their afterlife in print.Interestingly, in 1929 Katharine Woolley declined to broadcast for the usual BBC fees, which her husband usually accepted. 43Hilda Matheson put this down to the high fees both Woolleys' were able to command for their public lectures in Britain and the United States, but there remains the difference between the couple's willingness to further promote themselves and the excavation, of which Katharine had become an integral part.
Between 1926 and 1928 Woolley and the excavation at Ur were at the height of their fame due to the discovery of the Royal Cemetery.Probably due to the numerous other commitments this engendered, Woolley only delivered one talk each in 1927 and 1928.After that, there seems to have occurred a shift in the Talks Department's appreciation of his topic.It is clear from Hilda Matheson's comments in 1929 that the BBC put great emphasis on talks that would attract a large audience.In an internal memo Matheson wrote that she found his work 'new and interesting' and realised it was 'quite impossible to deal with it or even give any idea of it in the ordinary quarter of an hour', yet they were not as sensational as the previous year. 44She proposed another 45-minute talk (given on 28 August 1929), which would furthermore be printed in the newly established Listener, Woolley's first article in this periodical. 45Matheson clearly valued Woolley's ability to speak to a range of audiences and had proposed him as a National Lecturer.But apparently it was agreed in the end that he was not quite a big enough man for our purpose, being merely an admirable field worker and not a man who surveys the results secured in different parts of the world and sums them up. 46ing able to summarise broad developments in a field by many researchersnot only one's own researchwas valued more highly by the selection committee than being at the cutting edge of fieldwork or scientific experimentation.Yet 'sensational' and unique discoveries (which of course required the skills of an admirable field worker) were deemed more likely to attract an audience.Archaeology as a field science has struggled with these conflicting demands, perhaps more so than other, laboratory-or archive-based disciplines.As explored by Heather Ellis, science in Britain has undergone a number of shifts between valuing exploratory and experimental science and the associated 'masculinity' or 'manliness' in the early nineteenth century, to a mid-nineteenth century preference of synthesis over discovery. 47Over the fin-de-siècle and into the interwar period, the growth spurt of the British Empire supported the entanglement of exploration, imperial expansion, colonial expertise and science, into which archaeology fit itself neatly. 48The selection committee's appraisal of Woolley shows yet another swing back to valuing the established scholar and his 'objective' appraisal and communication of the work of others while continuing to demand spectacular finds.

Digging up the Past
In the end, there was no National Lecture on archaeology, although it is difficult to assess whether the subject itself was dropped or whether the advisory committee and staff were unable to find or agree on someone to fulfil that role.Instead, Matheson contacted Woolley in early 1930 to propose a series of six talks in the summer to cover a wide range of archaeological subjects, focusing on examples from the EM and SWANA regions.Woolley accepted, but on the condition that he could give an additional talk timed to promote the opening of the annual exhibition of finds at the British Museum. 49Remarkably, while his fee for the series of six talks was agreed at 100 guineas, he received 50 guineas for this additional broadcast.'Digging up the Past' was broadcast in June and July, the additional talk on 30 June, and the six talks were subsequently, although after some haggling, published in The Listener. 50As mentioned above, speakers were required to submit a manuscript to the Talks Department in advance.Apparently, Woolley was unwilling or unable to do so, causing Lambert to write to him to request a meeting to prevent delays to publication . 51The outcome of this is not recorded but seems to have led to a misunderstanding between Woolley, the Talks Department and The Listener, resulting in the magazine at first declining the material.In the early days of the periodical, publication of a talk resulted in an additional payment of up to 40% of the broadcast fee, and it is probably the potential loss of this income that prompted Woolley to involve his extensive network of contacts. 52riting to John Reith, Lord Gainford , one of the governors of he BBC, claimed that Woolley's talks 'would form the matter for separate publication, where as by giving talks for the B.B.C and having them published in the "Listener" his interests as a publisher are greatly prejudiced'.As Woolley was 'a poor man', getting 'comparatively little remuneration' for his excavation work, Gainford suggested that Woolley should be paid an additional 50 guineas for publication in the magazine. 53Neither in the BBC Written Archive, nor in the excavation archive (held in the British Museum's Central Archive) is there any information on whether Woolley saw himself as broadcasting as the director of the excavation, funded by the two museums, and therefore contributing his fees to the excavation accounts, or whether he saw it as adding to his private income. 54Reith requested a chronological account of the matter of Woolley's fees, with Hilda Matheson taking on an increasingly defensive tone, emphasising that publication in The Listener did not spoil subsequent publication but tended to help it. 55Indeed, published by Ernest Benn Ltd. in 1930 (with additional material) and picked up by Penguin for the first ten numbers of the Pelican series in 1937, Digging up the Past has been in print ever since. 56The book's inclusion in the first ten titles of the series, alongside titles on politics, economics and history, illustrates well the prominent place archaeology occupied in interwar reading and listening.
Woolley gave only four further talks for the BBC before the outbreak of the Second World War, only two of which were picked up by The Listener. 57When Lord Gainford tried BREAKING NEW GROUND.C. LEONARD WOOLLEY'S ARCHAEOLOGY TALKS ON THE  BBC, 1922-1939  to interfere with the Talks Departments' fees in 1931 again, Charles Douglas Carpendale told him that Woolley did not appeal as much as in previous years, and the fee of 20 guineas, as suggested, was more than justified. 58With the end of the Ur excavations in 1934, this phase of Woolley's relationship with the BBC thus came to an end.

Conclusion
As this article has shown, archaeology talks formed a consistent strand for the BBC Talks Department, for which they were willing to pay speakers well above the usual feesas long as they remained popular.Archaeologists profited not only from the publicity for their projects and the remuneration attached to broadcasts but also reached out to new listening and reading audiences over the airwaves and in print.By including The Radio Times and The Listener in a study of radio lectures I have emphasised the entangled character of the broadcast and the printed word.Taking an entangled approach to understanding the place of science talks on interwar radio, using printed schedules, articles in The Radio Times and The Listener as well as archival sources points the way for further research in contextualising archaeology's place in interwar science and society.I have provided part of this context in giving an overview of how various geographical regions appeared on the radio, which has revealed surprising absences (such as ancient Egypt) and further avenues of exploration, especially for archaeology in the British Isles.Leonard Woolley's numerous broadcasts and the ups and downs of his popularity as a speakeraccording to BBC staffhas moreover highlighted the importance of taking into account the wider context of a speaker's world.The social calendar of the London season, the successful publicising of discoveries through other channels and the real or perceived standing of a scholar in their discipline must all be considered in order to navigate the entangled worlds of radio, public communication of science and the history of disciplines.
Leonard Woolley's book Digging up the Past, published by Ernest Benn Ltd. in 1930 and picked up by Penguin as the fourth book in the Pelican series in 1937, was based on his lecture series of the same name (to which we will return later on), published shortly after broadcasting in the pages of The Listener.