Margaret Guido

Cecily Margaret Guido (née Preston; 1912–1994), known as Peggy Piggott during her first marriage, was a British archaeologist and museum curator.

Early life

Guido was born Cecily Margaret Preston in 1912 in Kent, England. Her father was Arthur Gurney Preston, a wealthy ironmaster. As a child, she had an interest in Roman coinage.

Career

Guido learnt to excavate in the 1930s under Mortimer Wheeler at his excavation of Verulamium. From 1935 to 1936, she studied archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology in London.

With her first husband, Stuart Piggott, she was involved in the excavations of barrows on Crichel and Launceston Downs in Dorset in 1938, and the excavations of Sutton Hoo in 1939. While her husband was serving abroad during World War II, Guido was networking in the UK. She developed a friendship with Austin Lane Poole who allowed her husband to study for a degree at the University of Oxford on his return from war. This was vital to her husbands future career and meant he satisfied requirements for the Abercromby Chair in archaeology at Edinburgh University. He took up the Chair in 1947. Guido and her husband were once more an excavating team and were employed by the RCAHMS throughout Scotland. She led the excavations of a number of Iron Age hill forts, including Hownam Rings (in 1948), Hayhope Knowe (in 1949), Bonchester Hill (in 1950) and Milton Loch Crannog (in 1953).

She was curator of Devizes Museum in her later years.

In retirement, she cared for A. W. Lawrence who was the younger brother of T. E. Lawrence and a classical scholar. After the death of his wife in 1986, Lawrence moved in with Guido and they lived together until his death in 1991.

Personal life

On 12 November 1936, the then Margaret Preston married her first husband, the archaeologist Stuart Piggott. They had met while they were both students at the Institute of Archaeology in London. By 1954 their relationship was over and they divorced in 1956. In 1957, she married Luigi Guido; they had met while she was undertaking research in Sicily. Two years later, Luigi had a psychotic break down and spent six months strapped to his bed being cared for by Margaret. At the end of this period, he suddenly decided to leave his wife and moved back to Sicily: Margaret never heard from him again.