Reference collections at UCL- a brief history

Recently published is a short account of the UCL archaeobotany laboratory reference collections, "Seeding and branching out: sixty years of a laboratory for plants in archaeology". The archaeobotany laboratory began in earnest in 1964, with the arrival of Geoffrey Dimbleby as Professor of Human Envionrment. He was a palynologist, who had contributed to archaeology through the reconstruction past environments through studying palaeosols in northern England, e.g. his book

The Development of British Heathlands and Their Soils (1962). By the end of later 1960s he had broadened his archaeobotanical interests, as represented by his book Plants and Archaeology (1967), and in the 1970s he began teaching an MSc-- among its early students was George Willcox, who went on to make important contributions on the archaeobotany of London, Afghanistan, and Syria (among other places). After Dimbleby's retirement in 1979, David R Harris TBA from UCL Geography became professor of Human Environment. David brought on board Gordon Hillman, first as research fellow (1981) and then lecturer (1983), and they established a quite famour MSc program which focused on archaeobotany on alternative years.Through these years and onwards, including since I joined UCL in 2000, our reference collections have grown. The have grown in geographical breadth and categories of plant materials, but they have also been enhanced through cataloguing anf storage, making them more accessible for teaching and research, including visitors who want come and consult for research. I am especalli thankful for the years of efforts at curation and cataloguing by Dr Sue Colledge, our honorary professor, who worked with Hillman and Harris as a research assistant in the 1980s, was emlpoyed to curate Hillman's collections for a couple of years from his reitrmement in 1998, and who was a post-doctoral researcher on numerous projects here in the 21st century.