Peggy Guido
Cecily Margaret Guido, (née Preston; 5 August 1912 – 8 September 1994), also known as Peggy Piggott, was an English archaeologist, prehistorian, and finds specialist. 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. Early life Guido was born Cecily Margaret Preston on 5 August 1912 in Beckenham, Kent. She was the daughter of 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. The family home was a twenty-room mansion, Wood Lodge, in West Wickham, on the line of a Roman road. Her father drowned in Cornwall in the summer of her eighth birthday; her mother remarried and Peggy was brought up by an aunt. Education As a child, Guido 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). Guido was particularly fond of Tessa, and spoke of her with great affection, dedicating her glass beads monograph to her memory. In 1935, she was photographed working on the Whitehawk Camp ceramics with E. Cecil Curwen. From 1935 to 1936, Guido 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 her first husband, Stuart Piggott, whom she married on 12 November 1936. Career Early interests Guido began her archaeological career by working on the Early Iron Age. 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, and 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 seems to have been as great an influence on Guido as the Wheelers. 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. Guido was a skilled excavator and heavily involved in the high-profile excavation of the Anglo-Saxon boat burial at Sutton Hoo (in 1939) with Charles Phillips. Bronze Age However, Guido's own excavations mostly focused on the Bronze Age. The first excavation she directed (in 1937) at the age of 25 was the Middle Bronze Age barrow and urnfield cemetery at Latch Farm (Hampshire); its publication the following year also added significantly to the gazetteer of cremation