Margaret Guido

Cecily Margaret Guido (née Preston; 5 August 1912 – 8 September 1994), known as Peggy Piggott during her first marriage, was a well-known archaeologist, prehistorian, and finds specialist. Her career in British Archaeology spanned sixty years. She is recognised for her field methods; her field-leading research into prehistoric settlement (hillforts and roundhouses), burial traditions, and artefact studies (particularly Iron Age to Anglo-Saxon glass beads); as well as her high-quality, rapid publication, contributing more than 50 articles and books to her field between the 1930s-1990s.

Guido was born Cecily Margaret Preston on 5 August 1912 in Beckenham, Kent, England. Peggy was the eldest of two children to Elsie Marie Fidgeon - whose father was of independent means - and Arthur Gurney Preston, a Cambridge-educated engineer, and wealthy ironmaster, who is also recorded as of independent means at the time of her birth. Peggy's family home was a twenty-room mansion, Wood Lodge in West Wickham. During her childhood, her mother remarried, and during the summer of her eighth birthday her father drowned in Cornwall, after which she was brought up by her aunt.

As a child, Peggy had an interest in Roman coins. As a young woman she met and began excavating with Mortimer Wheeler and Tessa Verney Wheeler, spending her 21st birthday digging the Roman town of Verulamium (in 1933). Peggy was particularly fond of Tessa, and spoke of her with great affection, dedicating her glass beads monograph to her memory. Peggy gained her first degree (then a diploma for women) from the University of Cambridge (in 1934). From 1935 to 1936, she studied archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology in London, where she was awarded a postgraduate diploma in Western European Prehistory. It was here that she met first husband, Stuart Piggott, whom she married on 12 November 1936.

Piggott began her archaeological career by working on the Early Iron Age – a period that largely still eludes us today. She began by writing up the rescue excavation of an Early Iron Age site at Southcote (Berkshire), which appeared in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society (in 1937); publishing the pottery from Iron Age Theale the following year. In 1938-39, she worked on The Prehistoric Society's first research excavation at the Early Iron Age type-site of Little Woodbury (Wiltshire) She worked here with Gerhard Bersu, who ultimately seems to have been as great an influence on Peggy as the Wheelers. In 1939, she 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.

...
Wikipedia