Why Digitise the Notebooks?

 In 2007, Rafal Kolinski wrote about Max Mallowan's excavations at Tell Arbid in Syria, stating:

"It turned out that the sites Mallowan chose for his research were some of the  most interesting in the area. It is little wonder, therefore, that archaeological work has recently  been resumed on most of them. The first to be excavated again was Tell Brak, to which a team from the British School of Archaeology in Iraq returned in 1976. Tell Arbid became the focus of excavations by a joint Polish-Syrian Mission in 1996, while another joint mission, composed of British, Belgian, and Syrian teams, has worked at Tell Chagar Bazar since 1999. This new research has resulted in increasing interest in the previous excavations which, on the one hand, provided additional evidence concerning the sites and, on the other hand, could now be interpreted more fully, based on evidence from more recent work."

Tell Arbid

Although Max Mallowan had used his field notes to write up comprehensive reports of his findings, he had concentrated mainly on Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak; his findings from Tell Arbid were recorded on 'a single page', reports Kolinski.

In search of more information, Kolinski consulted the Mallowan Archive, kept in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum. Kolinski gives a description of what he found, stating that Max's documentation for his work in Syria 'consists of several small notebooks written in pencil'; within one of the notebooks Kolinski found two days worth of notes that referred to Max's findings at Tell Arbid, but laments that 'one or more of the original notebooks may be missing'.

He also includes, within his report, two illustrations from the notebook and it was with excitement that I realised I was about to digitise a 'missing notebook'; confirmed by the fact that the dates in the notebooks followed through.

Tell Sabi Abyad

A team from Leiden University in the Netherlands and the National Museum of Antiquities are currently running a project looking at Tell Sabi Abyad, one of Max Mallowan's 'whacking great Tells' (in Agatha Christie Mallowans Come, Tell Me How You Live), situated in the Balikh Valley in Syria. 

Although the current situation in Syria has resulted in a temporary cease to excavations in the area, the team remain focused and have taken the opportunity to 'modernize and make public the archive of the Tell Sabi Abyad excavations' which is currently only available on paper and only 'physically accessible'. The archive spans twenty four years of excavations and the team has secured a grant from DANS (Digital Archiving and Networked Services).

Although the notebooks in this collection do not relate directly to Tell Sabi Abyad, they do relate to other Tells within the Balikh Valley, and can therefore add another layer to the story of the excavations completed  in the area.

Economics and Archaeology: The Riddle of the Sands?

Professor Tim Barmby (University of Aberdeen) and Professor Peter Dolton (Royal Holloway College) discovered one of Max Mallowan's Tell Brak notebooks (whilst it was part of an exhibition at the British Museum) and used the recorded bakshish (an extra payment paid to workers for the finds made that day) to write a paper about Incentives and Labour Contracts on Archaeological Digs in Northern Syria in the 1930s.

Notebook number nine in this collection contains further examples of bakshish payments made by Max Mallowan at Tell Aswad and Tell Sahlan (see below).