One person's trash is another's treasure! In his newly revised classic, All the Best Rubbish, Ivor NoËl Hume traces the fascinating history of collecting from its recorded beginnings and describes the remarkable detective work that goes into establishing the probable facts about uncovered and often underappreciated treasures. Now expanded with hints, tips, and helpful information about antique-hunting online, All the Best Rubbish is the ideal book for the antiquarian or amateur, the historian or professional collector—for anyone who knows that there's no such thing as "just junk." NoËl Hume, former head of the Department of Archaeology for Colonial Williamsburg, has pursued bottles, pottery, clocks, and coins through junk shops, street markets, attics, and cellars on two continents. He's unearthed the most fascinating—and valuable—rubbish from the most unlikely places: the shores of the Thames in London; the lagoons of the Caribbean; the bottom of Martha Washington's well. Hume knows everything that's worth knowing about collecting—why we do it, what we can find, where we can find it, and what we can learn from it.

All the Best Rubbish: The Classic Ode to Collecting

Arts & Photography

Noel-Hume, Ivor

History & Criticism

Harper Paperbacks

Here's an archaeologist's experience in the field and the museum--part history, part memoir, part buyer's guide. This book is an indispensable guide for the historian, the collector, the curious.

A Guide to Artifacts of Colonial America

History

Americas

KNOPF

A firsthand account of an important excavation in American historical archaeology. The discovery of a lost plantation and the some evidence we have of English colonial life in early seventeenth century Virginia

Martin's Hundred : the discovery of a lost colonial Virginia settlement

Dell

Virginia Adventure

Politics & Social Sciences

Archaeology

Random House Value Publishing

Archaeology,

Gifford

The author describes his archeological excavation of a seventeenth-century English settlement in Virginia and his discovery of evidence of the early colonial way of life.

Martin's Hundred

University of Virginia Press

Reprint of the Knopf edition of 1963, with a brief new preface and a long afterword dealing with changes over the last 30 years. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Here Lies Virginia: An Archaeologist's View of Colonial Life and History.

Univ of Virginia Pr

Ivor Noël Hume has devoted his life to uncovering countless lives that came before him. In A Passion for the Past the world-renowned archaeologist turns to his own life, sharing with the reader a story that begins amid the bombed-out rubble of post–World War II London and ends on North Carolina’s Roanoke Island, where the history of British America began. Weaving the personal with the professional, this is the chronicle of an extraordinary life steered by coincidence scarcely believable even as fiction.
Born into the good life of pre-Depression England, Noël Hume was a child of the 1930s who had his silver spoon abruptly snatched away when the war began. By its end he was enduring a period of Dickensian poverty and clinging to aspirations of becoming a playwright. Instead, he found himself collecting antiquities from the shore of the river Thames and, stumbling upon this new passion, becoming an "accidental" archaeologist.
From those beginnings emerged a career that led Noël Hume into the depths of Roman London and, later, to Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg, where for thirty-five years he directed its department of archaeology. His discovery of nearby Martin’s Hundred and its massacred inhabitants is perhaps Noël Hume’s best-known achievement, but as these chapters relate, it was hardly his last, his pursuit of the past taking him to such exotic destinations as Egypt, Jamaica, Haiti, and to shipwrecks in Bermuda.
When the author began his career, historical archaeology did not exist as an academic discipline. It fell to Noël Hume’s books, lectures, and television presentations to help bring it to the forefront of his profession, where it stands today. This story of a life, and a career, unlike any other reveals to us how the previously unimagined can come to seem beautifully inevitable.

A Passion for the Past: The Odyssey of a Transatlantic Archaeologist

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

The Italian son of a barber. A failed hydraulic engineer. A giant who performed feats of strength and agility in the circus. Giovanni Belzoni (1778-1824) was all of these before going on to become one of the most controversial figures in the history of Egyptian archaeology. A man of exceptional size with an ego of comparable proportions, he procured for the British Museum some of its largest and still awe-inspiring treasures. Today, however, the typical museum visitor knows nothing of Belzoni, and many modern archaeologists dismiss him as an ignorant vandal. In this captivating new biography, Ivor Noël Hume re-creates an early nineteenth century in which there was no established archaeological profession, only enormous opportunity. Belzoni landed in Egypt, where he was unsuccessful in selling a hydraulic machine of his own invention, and came under the patronage of diplomat Henry Salt, who convinced him to travel to Thebes in search of artifacts. Among the many treasures Belzoni would bring back was the seven-ton stone head of Ramesses II, the "Young Memnon." The book includes gripping accounts of Belzoni's wildly productive, and physically brutal, expeditions, as well as an unforgettable portrait of his wife, Sarah, who suffered the hardships of the Egyptian deserts and later bore the brunt of the disillusionment that came with the declining popular perception of her husband. Including numerous illustrations, many in color, this volume brings one of archaeology's most fascinating figures vividly to life.

Belzoni: The Giant Archaeologists Love to Hate

Book by Hanel, W., Kadmon, C., Kadmon, Cristina

Discoveries in Martin's Hundred

Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

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