Olwen Brogan Papers

Includes correspondence, notes, publications, maps, plans, photographic material (photographs, slides, negatives and glass plate negatives), drawings and sketches, press cuttings, miscellaneous material and finds relating to Brogan's work and travels to Gergovia (France), Libya (notably including Ghirza), other north African countries and other non-African countries.

Olwen Brogan was born Olwen Phillis Frances Kendall on 15 December 1900 in Holyhead. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies College and University College London, where her first degree was in History. Her MA thesis was on the Roman Limes in Germany (supervised by Sir Mortimer Wheeler), and she went on to study the Tripolitanian limes. Following study she held lectureships in Minnesota and at University College London, marrying the historian Denis Brogan in 1931, with whom she had four children. She worked as Secretary of the Faculty of Archaeology, History and Letters of the British School at Rome and, during the 1930s participated in excavations at the hill fort reputed to be the site of Gergovia, near Clermont-Ferrand. During the Second World War she worked part-time for the Admiralty. Following the War she took part in excavations at Sabratha (under the auspices of the British School at Rome) with Kathleen Kenyon and Lepcis Magna with John Ward Perkins. She then went on to study (from 1952) the ancient site of Ghirza in the Tripolitanian desert, working primarily with David Smith (from 1955-7), in partnership with the Department of Antiquities of Tripolitania. This resulted in the publication "Ghirza: A Libyan Settlement in the Roman Period" (by Brogan and Smith), published in 1984. Brogan continued to visit Libya until the early 1980s. She was a founder member, first secretary and later Vice President of the Society for Libyan Studies. Following the death of Denis Brogan in 1974, Olwen married Charles Hackett and initially lived in Libya, in order to continue her work there, subsequently returning to live in England, where she died on 18 December 1989 in Cambridge.

Papers were arranged into series reflecting the main foci of Brogan's work (Gergovia, Ghirza and other Libyan sites), with supplementary series on Africa (Brogan visited other north African countries to broaden her knowledge and obtain comparative material) and non-African materials.

The image below is D41/2/7, of Brogan taking a squeeze of Tomb North C, Ghirza.

Available for general access

Please contact the BILNAS General Secretary on gensec@bilnas.org If you wish to consult the archive.

The material was donated to the Society for Libyan Studies by Brogan's son Hugh c. 1990-1992. It was originally housed at Newcastle University, where it was packed into numbered files and boxes, with two copies of a rudimentary finding aid produced (noting main subject matter, format of material and sometimes rough dates). Following the material being moved to the University of Leicester (c. 2011), each box (and each file within the boxes) was given a new number and the contents noted (often with further information than previously), details being entered on to an Excel spreadsheet.