Samuel spent a month in London in October 2024 to carry out research for his doctoral thesis.

I would like to express my warm thanks to the Robert Anderson Trust for hosting me in their beautiful old town house in Highgate Village while I gathered material for my PhD. As an archaeologist and student of the ancient Near East, this extended stay in London was a unique opportunity to study with my own eyes museum collections that I usually access through catalogues. London’s substantial museum collections in turn meant that I was able to locate several rare books that are important to my research. The Institute of Archaeology Library at University College London, in particular, made for a frequent writing place during my stay. Howard, the Coordinator of the Trust gave me a very helpful orientation of the libraries that were useful to me.

Recording traces of damage in a stone object at the Ashmolean. Photo by: Axel Horne. With permission from the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

As my PhD investigates the destruction of stone imagery in the ancient Near East, much of my stay with the Robert Anderson Trust revolved around stone in various ways. One highlight of my stay was having the opportunity to carry out photography and close-range photogrammetry (a method for digital 3D-modeling) of carved stone imagery at the Ashmolean Museum, with the purpose of searching the damaged areas for traces of tool use. In order to distinguish tool traces within the damage to the objects, I apply experimental traceology, which means that stone samples are damaged using tool replicas, and the resulting traces are cross-referenced with the damage in the 3D modeled stone images. As one of my PhD articles deals with the defacement of similar motifs, but of a different age and find context, the analysis of the objects recorded here will offer valuable information on the geographic and temporal extents of the defacement of such imagery. Thanks are in order to the helpful staff at the Ashmolean, who managed to book me at short notice despite being at near-capacity.

In addition, I was also able to inspect and photograph traces from quarrying and carving in worked stone from ancient Egypt at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. Creating a wide reference base of the appearance of various tool traces in different stones is necessary when one attempts to diagnose traces of damage in stone imagery. The Petrie Museum had on display also a range of copper alloy tools, which serve as examples of the kind of tools that may have been available to the ancient iconoclast.

On the same note, the British Museum had on display a wide array of Mesopotamian and Egyptian sculptures and reliefs, and I was able to make a survey of the damage present in these. Surveys of this kind are not only useful for expanding one’s reference base of damaged monuments, but they give important data regarding promising targets of more high-resolution analysis. The close-range photogrammetry (a method for digital 3D modeling), that we had planned to do of a selection of Assyrian monuments, unfortunately had to be postponed due to some access and scheduling issues. I am therefore very thankful to the Robert Anderson Trust for offering me the invitation to return to their Highgate Village house to complete my mission at the British Museum once everything has been cleared.

While my research focuses on Mesopotamian imagery, the destruction of monuments is of course a phenomenon we see echoed in many places and periods, the present being no exception. Walking the galleries of the British Museum was therefore an opportunity to broaden my understanding of this phenomenon by familiarising myself with damaged monuments from completely different contexts. This led to new perspectives on my current material and opened up possible future avenues for iconoclasm research.

As a sidenote on the theme of stone: I happened to be completing a course in geology during my stay with the Robert Anderson Trust, and London’s Natural History Museum served as a quite handy place to do my assignments, as I could observe the stones and minerals as I was writing about them.

Last but certainly not least, a major benefit of research trips is of course getting the chance to interact with the local community of researchers and colleagues, and it was nice to speak with both old and new acquaintances based in and around London. I for instance caught a lovely London Centre of the Ancient Near East seminar during my stay.

My thanks again to the Robert Anderson Trust for making the trip possible!