Annual Report 2008-9 - The British School at Rome

has been able to ensure that despite the surge in reader
numbers, the Library has retained its welcoming
atmosphere.
Valerie Scott has also carried forward, despite the tough
financial climate, her programme of projects and exhibitions
of material from our archive of historical photographs and
other material. The Getty Foundation has been a key ally
in recent years, and the workshop held in Los Angeles on
Sir William Gell, at which both Valerie and I spoke,
underlined our common interests. A new ally is the Sir John
Soane Museum, which proved the perfect partner for an
exhibition of the Rome photographs of Father Peter Paul
Mackey. The sponsors who made this possible are thanked
below, but it is right here to pay tribute to the energy and
determination of the team of Jill Pellew and Valerie Scott,
who ensured that the right support was found. Such
partnerships are an essential way forward for the future, and
the ongoing series of photographic exhibitions is another
point where the disciplines converge; photography and fine
art on the one hand (and our new partnership with
Photoworks is also relevant here), and archaeology and the
history of art on the other.
I turn finally, among our activities, to archaeology. The
British Academy is keen to emphasise that the institutes it
supports abroad are not simply bases for archaeological
fieldwork, and the British School is equally keen to remind
them that our aims have never been limited in this way.
Nevertheless, archaeology has a fundamental role in our
mission. If it were not for the physical reality of the past, it
might not be so necessary to spend long periods of time
abroad in trying to get to grips with it. Ancient historians
(including myself) and classical philologists and even art
historians might sit at home in their libraries. But the past is
physically present, even when it seems invisible, as in the
street patterns of contemporary Rome or Naples (or for that
matter most other Italian cities), which continue to steer
humans between modern buildings down routes used for
thousands of years. The study of the physical traces of the
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past will always be the core activity of this institution. But it
is not the focus of a narrow disciplinary subset. It is an
inherently interdisciplinary activity. Every group of residents
who visit a monument rapidly understands how the presence
of artists and architects, art historians and social scientists,
field archaeologists and philologists, converges in the reading
of the visible past. The School is not merely a facility: it is a
missionary enterprise that seeks to convert all those who
come through it to an understanding of this visible, physical
past. Our Hugh Last Fellow, Stephen Heyworth, a
distinguished editor of Latin poetry from Oxford, left a
convert to topography, the discipline of Sir William Gell and
Thomas Ashby, and their successors today, like Filippo
Coarelli and Robert Coates-Stephens.
Working at Herculaneum in an ambitious project of
conservation, I have learned above all that archaeology is
neither a single discipline, nor one that can exist in
isolation. We always knew that archaeologists would have
to join hands with architects, conservators, surveyors and
engineers to address the problems of the site, and to keep
what I have called the ‘visible past’ in such a state to ensure
its visibility to future generations. What has taken me by
surprise is the number of other disciplines we have found
ourselves involving. Geologists have taught us to
understand the long process of volcanic eruption and the
transformations, sometimes slow, sometimes alarmingly
rapid, of the landscape. Chemists have shown us how to
analyse the salts that eat away frescoes and the mortars and
grouting that affect the ancient surfaces. Computer
specialists have shown how a Laser Speckle Interferometer
or Polynomial Texture Mapping can reveal otherwise
invisible faults or bring back ancient colours. It is not just
the application of high-tech solutions. The world of
heritage management brought together by ICCROM has
taught us that beyond technical solutions, you have to work
on the right relations with the stakeholders, from visitor
management to relations with the local community.
Urbanists and social scientists have taught us to study a site