Waechter-Higgs Collection

The collection is composed of 2 formerly separate archives:

Waechter Collection

John Waechter was Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, in Palaeolithic Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology in London from the 1950s to the 1970s. Through personal contacts the Department of Archaeology and Prehistory at the University of Sheffield acquired his extensive collection of offprints after his death in 1978. The collection includes a large corpus of work back to the 1880s, and is exceptional because of its time-depth and breadth of coverage. The collection is especially strong on the British and European palaeolithic between 1900 and 1960, but also includes much rare material on East and South Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, China, and the Far East. It covers most of the key journal accounts of palaeolithic excavations and fieldwork in Britain and Europe between 1900 and 1960, and much of the key palaeolithic research that took place in that period in Africa and Asia.

Higgs Collection

E.S. Higgs was Assistant and later Deputy Director of Research in the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University in the 1960s until his death in 1976, when the Department of Archaeology and Prehistory at Sheffield University acquired his collection of offprints. The main areas of interest are prehistoric subsistence, the late palaeolithic to the neolithic, and the origins of agriculture in Europe and the Near East. The collection includes a high proportion of the articles that were published on prehistoric subsistence, archaeozoology and archaeobotany worldwide between 1960 and 1976.

The Collection received a Follett award in 1995 for the production of a catalogue of the contents and their conservation. The catalogue has been mounted on the World Wide Web at the following URL:

http://rother.shef.ac.uk/waechter-higgs/

The documents are at present in the care of the Department of Archaeology, to whom application for access should be made directly.