Lord William Taylour. Parallel Lives in Greece and Cambridge

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This contribution considers the papers of Lord William ‘Billy’ Taylour, a British archaeologist working in Greece between the 1950s and 1980s: specifically, it looks at what it is about Taylour’s archive in its formation and character that allows for a deep archival archaeology of his work. Recent 3D GIS reconstruction that has brought into clearer focus Taylour’s early work at Pylos has been enabled by two particular dimensions of his papers: the availability and abundance of archival material, and the rich and detailed nature of their documentation. By considering the scope of Taylour’s archaeological archive in Cambridge alongside other institutional archives in which he features, this chapter suggests that it was Taylour’s background in finance and his mentality for clear, extensive, and objective documentation that makes his work so ripe for re-evaluation today. Furthermore, by considering Taylour’s ubiquitous appearance in the archives of the Cambridge University Catholic Chaplaincy, this chapter argues that Taylour was too preoccupied by other duties in Cambridge to commit fully to the publication of archaeological work completed in Greece, with the effect that he wrote in a way so that others could continue to work on his archaeological data when he himself did not have the time. In addition to attributing this to a general sense of openness and generosity, this paper also suggests that Taylour conceptualized his papers within his own lifetime as an open ‘library’, before consciously sorting and labelling his notes into an ‘archive’ prior to his death.