Margaret Jones

Margaret Ursula Owen, archaeologist: born Birkenhead, Cheshire 16 May 1916; married 1940 Tom Jones (died 1993); died Hereford 23 March 2001.

Margaret Ursula Owen, archaeologist: born Birkenhead, Cheshire 16 May 1916; married 1940 Tom Jones (died 1993); died Hereford 23 March 2001.

MARGARET JONES was almost the last of a generation of self-taught archaeologists who were employed on a contract basis by the Ministry of Works in the 1950s and 1960s.

Her career culminated in 11 gruelling years of excavating the huge gravel site of Mucking, on the north bank of the Thames estuary, near Thurrock in Essex. It was the largest open area excavation yet attempted in Britain, and it uncovered an extensive and very rich cemetery of some of the earliest Saxon settlers together with their village. A palimpsest of crop-marks, the site also revealed important Late Bronze Age material, and continuous occupation from this to the late Saxon period.

In this exposed wasteland Jones, her husband Tom and Reject the stray dog lived year-round in their caravan (there was a second for visitors), surrounded by a succession of hundreds of "volunteer" diggers. They came from Britain and abroad, and a generation of respectable middle-aged archaeologists still boasts of being dosed with patent medicine, learning to bake their own bread and other rigours among the Thames gravels. To have dug with Margaret Jones at Mucking remains a badge of honour.

Margaret Ursula Owen was born at Birkenhead in 1916, and was educated at Caldertones Girls' High School and Liverpool University. She read Geography under Bill Varley, who introduced her to archaeology as a volunteer working on Iron Age hillforts in Cheshire and Yorkshire. Here she also met Tom, whom she married in due course. She moved to teach in Dublin, but returned to Liverpool when the Second World War broke out, worked in the censorship office there until bombed out, and in London during the V1 and V2 attacks, while Tom spent most of the war as a soldier in Palestine.

On his return they moved to Birmingham and ran a freelance photographic enterprise recording notable buildings: Tom took the photographs and Margaret marketed them whilst writing on anything from rambling to cookery for the Birmingham Mail. It was enough to live on while they continued to learn their craft as volunteers in the Isles of Scilly and elsewhere with the leading archaeologists Bryan and Helen O'Neil.

Margaret Jones's professional career started in 1956 with excavations at Stanton Low, Buckinghamshire and the Roman town of Aldborough, Yorkshire. Archaeological grades were just being established and Tom often worked with her as assistant supervisor. In 1960 they worked on a rescue excavation at the Roman and Iron Age town at Old Sleaford in Lincolnshire. Here her reputation took off as they uncovered the remains of what is still the largest known Iron Age mint in Europe. At that time excavators were paid by the day while actually digging; no time was allowed for writing up and many acquired an unfair reputation for not publishing their results.

In 1970 the Joneses jumped at the chance to direct the huge long-term excavation at Mucking. Scores of visitors braved the spare caravan, and a succession of spiky letters, notes and interim reports found their way back to the more comfortable world of the journals. She was honoured by election, in 1974, as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

She was very widely read in archaeological literature, assiduously pursued parallels for her finds and, in the pre-computer age, kept meticulous records in hundreds of notebooks. But she had never had the training or the time to organise her findings. The challenge to write up that huge corpus of recorded detail came when she was ageing and tired after long years of continuous digging. It overwhelmed her. The task has fallen to others and two volumes have already appeared (Excavations at Mucking, volume one by Ann Clark, volume two by Helena Hamerow, both 1993).

After all the arduous years of joint work (not unpunctuated by notoriously vitriolic arguments) the Joneses retired to their Herefordshire cottage which had to be put into working order after waiting long for their arrival. The end was bitter. Tom soon had a massive stroke; Margaret nursed him with touching devotion, and her own ferocious and indomitable spirit was finally leached away by Parkinson's disease.

Sheila Elsdon

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