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Buried History 2013 - Volume 49, 17-22 Robert S. Merrillees 17
Veronica Seton-Williams:
A proud Australian Archaeologist
Robert S. Merrillees
DOI: https://doi.org/10.62614/n1z9bv61
Abstract: The archaeological life of Veronica Seton-Williams is briey sketched, drawing
largely on her autobiography, and her contribution to archaeology and Egyptology is dis-
cussed in the context of personal recollections.
Veronica Seton-Williams belonged to a pioneering gen-
eration of women archaeologists who had to overcome
many hurdles on the way to their chosen profession. Born
in 1910 and brought up in Melbourne where there were
no opportunities to study Old World or for that matter
Australian prehistory, she left in 1934 for England, as
many academically inclined Australians did and still
do. She had obtained a Bachelor of Arts Degree from
Melbourne University, and was enrolled at University
College London to do a Prehistoric Postgraduate Diploma.
Her real love was ancient Egyptian and she subsequently
lost no opportunity to engage in Egyptological research.
In the course of her archaeological career, she carried out
excavations and surveys all over the Near East, including
Cyprus. She survived the 1935/36 season of eldwork
with Sir Flinders and Lady Petrie at Sheikh Zuwayid
in the Sinai, ending up digging at Tell el-Fara’in in the
Nile Valley Delta from 1964/65 to 1968. Veronica spent
the rest of her days in England, where I rst met her,
but she never forgot her Australian origins and deeply
resented being introduced on a return visit to Melbourne
in 1948 as an ‘English cousin’. Before she died in 1992,
she produced an autobiography entitled The Road to El-
Aguzein (1988), where she recorded, without elaboration,
the frustrations she had had to endure in Melbourne and
London, and the way she succeeded in fullling her am-
bitions, without ever having held a permanent, full-time
academic position.
Veronica never received the recognition she was due
either in England or Australia. She was nevertheless well
connected with the archaeological communities in both
countries and aware where their interests intersected in
the Old World. While it is not known whether she had
any dealings before the Second World War with Mr
Walter J. Beasley, founder of the Australian Institute of
Archaeology in Melbourne (AIA), there are a number
of associations in common which may have been more
than co-incidental. The second Near Eastern dig in which
Veronica took part was the 1936 season at Jericho, con-
ducted by a Liverpool University expedition under the
direction of Professor John Garstang. This site was visited
by Mr Beasley a year earlier in the course of its excava-
tion by Garstang. Beasley provided funds to Garstang
and was in turn receiving objects from Jericho (Beasley
1938). It is to be expected that Garstang at some point
spoke with Veronica about his contact in her home town.
However Veronica does not mention Beasley’s name in
her autobiography.
Figure 2: Veronica at the time of her graduation from
the University of Melbourne 1934.
Photo: from Seton-Williams (1988: 88)
Figure 1: The 1935-36 Sheikh Zuwayid team, from
the left, Veronica Seton-Williams, Carl Pape, John
Waechter, Jack Ellis, Sir Flinders and Lady Petrie.
Photo: courtesty of University College London
18 Buried History 2013 - Volume 49, 17-22 Robert S. Merrillees
Beasley began collecting antiquities in 1934. Just prior
to the 1935/36 season at Sheikh Zuwayid, Petrie sent
Beasley a rich collection of Tell el-‘Ajjul material (AIA
doc 3510) and later sent objects from Sheikh Zuwayid
(Petrie & Ellis 1937); this is now the only material from
that site readily available for study. It is therefore probable
that the Petries also asked Veronica about Beasley. These
assemblages became the nucleus of the AIA’s collections,
which also beneted from further consignments sent by
Lady Petrie in the late 1940s. Veronica records in her
autobiography that Petrie was very proud of the fact that
his grandfather was Captain Matthew Flinders who rst
circumnavigated Australia, and that she checked Petrie’s
recollection of some the details of his forebear’s exploits
by writing to Professor Ernest Scott, an authority on
Flinders, who taught her history at Melbourne University
(Seton-Williams 1988: 17, 43).
Though she publicly acknowledged she had become an
expatriate by the end of the Second World War, Veronica
did not end her relationship with Australia. In 1948 she
spent nine weeks in Australia, primarily on family busi-
ness after her mother’s death, but managed a brief visit to
the Nicholson Museum in the University of Sydney. She
later became involved in the excavation of a Late Bronze
Age site at Myrtou Pigadhes in north-western Cyprus in
1950 under the sponsorship of Sydney University and the
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. According to her autobiog-
raphy, she resumed her eldwork at Tell Rifa’at in Syria
in 1960 with the support of what she calls the ‘Melbourne
Institute of Archaeology’ (Seton-Williams 1988: 120).
Veronica had excavated there in the 1955 and 1956 and the
AIA had provided £100 for each season (AIA docs 955,
956, 996-1001). Just as fellow Australian, Professor Vere
Gordon Childe, Director of the Institute of Archaeology
London, had helped Veronica nd employment in extra-
mural teaching, so Veronica took a comradely interest
in my own welfare and solvency while a postgraduate
Figure 3: Jericho 1936, Veronica and Mrs Garstang ‘watching’ the excavation of the Neolithic strata.
Veronica went on to excavate with Professor Garstang at Tell Keisan and Mersin.
Photo: courtesy of the Palestine Exploration Fund.
Figure 4: Jerusalem 1935, Veronica at the Swedish
Consulate - written on the reverse -‘wearing “the
Bradleys coat and skirt!” before the mouse got at it’.
Clothes are always an issue when starting life in a
new environment. Photo: courtesy of UCL Institute of
Archaeology Collections.
Buried History 2013 - Volume 49, 17-22 Robert S. Merrillees 19
student in the Department of Egyptology at University
College London in the early 1960s. So when I was invited
in 1996 to contribute to a volume in Veronica’s memory, I
did not hesitate to prepare and submit a personal tribute,
but the work never eventuated and my reminiscence was
never published. I am grateful to Christopher Davey for
this opportunity to put on record my appreciation and debt
to Veronica, which complements the account of her life
by Barbara Lesko (2004: accessed 13/12/2013):
In this liberated and more enlightened age,
when women in the Western world do not have
to scale legislative barriers to succeed, it is
dicult to imagine what obstacles, prejudices
and discrimination a single, unconventional,
Colonial female had to overcome in Britain
before and after the Second World War to make
her way in the academic profession. In fact
Veronica Seton-Williams never held a permanent
university appointment but made her living as a
free-lance archaeologist through a great range of
activities that not only did an enormous amount to
popularise Egyptology and indeed Near Eastern
archaeology in general but gave her a wide and
devoted circle of friends and admirers. That she
never lost her enthusiasm and generosity of spirit
despite the numerous set-backs to which she
was subjected during her life time is a glowing
tribute to one of the most warm-hearted people
to frequent the fringes of the incestuous world of
Egyptological scholarship in London.
I rst met Veronica in London though the intervention
of fellow-Australian, James R. Stewart, later rst Edwin
Cuthbert Hall Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology
at the University of Sydney, who had taken me with him
on a study trip to England and France in 1958/59. I only
got to know her better when I returned for a postgradu-
ate degree in the early 1960s. My abiding impression
from that early acquaintance, apart from
Veronica’s distinctively sensible man-
ner of dressing, was amazement that the
small at she shared with Elsa Coult in
Bloomsbury could bear the weight of the
books which occupied every spare space.
Then, as always, she was willing to lend a
helping hand, especially to another being
from Down Under, and I remember being
given the opportunity to read and take notes
from her doctoral dissertation on Syria
in the 2nd millennium B.C., whose own
history she recounts in her autobiography
(Seton-Williams 1988: 111-113). It was
the only comprehensive archaeological
synthesis of its kind in English at the time,
and the way it had been imposed on her as a
subject, initially referred by the University
of London, and never published, rankled
but never riled her. It can now be accessed
through the British Library’s invaluable Electronic Theses
Online Service (EThOS 241915). Getting her PhD in
1957 did not, however, materially improve Veronica’s
academic prospects.
Figure 5: Cyprus about 1938, Veronica (left) with her life-long friend
Joan du Plat Taylor at Joan’s house in Nicosia. Photo: courtesy Nicolle
Hirschfeld, from the archives of Margaret Walker-Brash (née Beazley).
Figure 6: Cyprus about 1938, Veronica liked the water
having spent much time around Port Phillip Bay.
Photo: courtesy Nicolle Hirschfeld, from the archives
of Margaret Walker-Brash (née Beazley).
20 Buried History 2013 - Volume 49, 17-22 Robert S. Merrillees
Her dissertation, entitled An Archaeological Examination
of the Material from the Syrian Sites of the Second Mil-
lennium 1800-1300 B.C., had particular relevance to a
research interest that was beginning to engage and nally
ensnared me - the location of the ancient place name of
Alashiya, long considered and still held by many to be
the island of Cyprus. I became convinced at an early stage
of my studies that the evidence for this equation was too
imsy for it to be sustained. I not only extracted from
Veronica’s work information relating to copper deposits
in Syria, with a view to demonstrating that Cyprus was
not the sole possible Near Eastern source of the metal
with which Alashiya was closely associated, but also drew
on her epic ‘Cilician Survey’ (Seton-Williams 1954), of
which she gave me an o-print, for a possible site for
Alashiya. Since all the circumstantial archaeological data
pointed to the Western Asiatic coast for the location of this
place, I sought a settlement in the north-eastern corner
of the Mediterranean and lit on Kinet Hüyük, the most
imposing tell around the Gulf of Iskenderun. Veronica
was not impressed by my hypothesis and drew on her
unrivalled rst-hand knowledge of the region to cast
legitimate doubts on this idea and suggest that the mouth
of the Orontes better suited the topographical criteria. I
included her comments in a post-script to my rst paper
on Alasia, and was always grateful for her forthright
response (Merrillees 1972 : 119).
Like Veronica, I had no grant or regular source of income
to maintain me during my years in London as a student
in the early 1960’s and with typical thoughtfulness she
once suggested that I take over her extramural lecturing
while she was away guiding a tour in Egypt. Nothing
during that somewhat demanding period could better have
illustrated the strong attachment felt by her followers to
their accustomed mentor than their unambiguous indica-
tion that I did not come up to her standards! In fact some
of the audience had been attending her courses for years,
and I realised then that I lacked the touch for teaching and
indeed the patience with which she was amply endowed.
This memory is recounted in my section on Veronica’s
contribution to Egyptology in Living with Egypt’s Past
in Australia (Merrillees et al. 1990: 43, 46, 48), of which
I sent her a rst draft. This gave me the happy excuse to
Figure 7: A wartime picnic, possibly at Hampstead Heath, Veronica with friends Joan du Plat Taylor, left, and
Margaret Munn-Rankin. Photo: courtesy of UCL Institute of Archaeology Collections
Figure 8: Wartime London, Veronica in her Air Raid
Warden’s Uniform. She and her friends had a number
of close shaves during the Blitz. Photo: courtesy of
UCL Institute of Archaeology Collections
Buried History 2013 - Volume 49, 17-22 Robert S. Merrillees 21
draw on her knowledge of 55 years’ involvement with
the British archaeological community, and her reactions
to the text were typically robust, ironical and to the point.
In her autobiography Veronica recounts her introduction
to hieroglyphs through the lecturer who taught German
to science students in Melbourne (Seton-Williams 1988:
19). His name was Egremont, and according to her letter
to me of 3 April 1989,
his wife developed cancer so he told me, and to
take his mind o things he learnt hieroglyphs while
nursing her. One way to do it I suppose. I also
had a letter from him the following year (1935). I
must have written to him saying I was thinking of
coming back to Australia and he strongly advised
against it. Rather ‘better 50 years of Europe than
a cycle of Cathay’, or words to that eect.
In 1953 she was invited by Stewart to join the Department
of Archaeology at Sydney University but, according to
her published account, declined because she did not want
to sever her connections with the Middle East (Seton-
Williams 1988: 111). In her letter to me of 23 July 1989,
she stated:
To be perfectly honest the reason I turned down
the Sydney job was that I was very uncertain that
I could work with Jim Stewart, specially working
at his home (in Bathurst), half the time. However,
the other reason sounds better and is partly true.
I can sympathise with her predicament.
Veronica never lost her essential Australianness and sense
of fair play. It says much for her forbearance that she never
harboured a grudge against W.B. Emery for allegedly
blocking her appointment to an academic position in the
Institute of Archaeology on the grounds of her gender
(Seton-Williams 1988: 121). She amplied this episode
in her letter of 23 July 1989 in the following way:
It was impossible to work in Egypt because of the
tabu that Emery put upon women in eld work.
He thought that no Egyptian would take orders
from a woman. In fact when I was appointed
Field Director at Tell el-Fara’in in 1964, the only
question he asked me was did I expect to have
trouble with my men. To which I replied - no. I
wonder what he would have said if he could have
seen some of the workmen from Ibtu that I had
sacked for some misdemeanour, putting my foot on
their head and saying they were my men!!
I can just see her doing that without the slightest inhibi-
tion. In fact it was not true that Emery did not allow
women to join his expeditions to Egypt. There were
undoubtedly other reasons for his reaction.
It is perhaps symptomatic of the ambivalence with which
her status and profession were viewed in Britain that the
fourth revised edition of Who Was Who in Egyptology
should still describe Veronica as a ‘British-Australian
archaeologist’ (Bierbrier 2012: 503). She was particularly
sensitive to any suggestion that her work might not be
Figure 9: Myrtou Pigadhes 1951, Team photo, front row from the left, James Mellaart, Hector Catling, Lord William
Taylour, Joan du Plat Taylor, Veronica, Linda Melton, Second row, Elizabeth Catling and the host and hostesses,
Photographer, Basil Hennessy, Absent: Margaret Munn-Rankin, Diana Kirkbride and Mick Wright.
Photo: courtesy of Linda Hennessy from the archives of Basil Hennessy
22 Buried History 2013 - Volume 49, 17-22 Robert S. Merrillees
treated seriously by the experts, especially Egyptolo-
gists, of which she was presumably not considered one,
and when in the rst draft of Living with Egypt’s Past in
Australia I referred to her scholarly output as ‘popular’,
the reaction was as usual brisk: ‘I do not think I would
call my books on Egypt exactly popular. [She then listed
her publications in a dierent order to the bibliography
in Who Was Who in Egyptology and went on] One might
call Tutankhamoun a coee table book, but certainly not
popular. Also Nile Handbook for Swans about four edi-
tions from 1974 to 1984. All my publications are in the
Baillieu Library of the University of Melbourne, where I
sent them as they came out’ (letter of 23 July 1989). With
due deference to Veronica, ‘popular’ became ‘authorita-
tive’ in the nal version of my study (Merrillees et al.
1990: 46). I am sorry I shall not receive any more of her
inimitably typewritten letters!
Robert S. Merrillees
References
Beasley, Walter J., 1938 Jericho’s judgment: The
fascinating story of modern archaeology, London:
Marshall, Morgan & Scott Ltd.
Bierbrier, M., 2012 Who Was Who in Egyptology (4th
Edition), London: Egypt Exploration Society.
Lesko, Barbara 2004 Marjory Veronica Seton-Williams
1910-1992, in Breaking Ground: Women in Old
World Archaeology Brown University, http://www.
brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/bios/Seton-
Williams_Veronica.pdf.
Merrillees, R. S., 1972 Alasia, in Acts of the First In-
ternational Cypriot Congress (Nicosia, 14 - 19 April
1969), eds. V. Karageorghis & A. Christodoulou,
Nicosia 111-9.
Merrillees, R. S., Colin A. Hope, G.L. Pretty, Piers
Crocker & Museum of Victoria., 1990 Living with
Egypt’s past in Australia, Melbourne: Museum of
Victoria.
Petrie, William Matthew Flinders Sir & J.C. Ellis, 1937
Anthedon, Sinai ... With chapters by J. C. Ellis,
London.
Seton-Williams, M.V., 1954 Report on the Cilician
Survey, Anatolian Studies 4, 121-74.
Seton-Williams, M.V., 1988 The road to El-Aguzein,
London: Kegan Paul.