My mother, Barbara Hurman, who has died aged 100, was an archaeologist specialising in the identification and illustration of finds – the items disinterred during the course of excavations.
She worked on a number of sites for the Bucks Museum, in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, the Milton Keynes Archaeological Unit, the Department of the Environment and the Museum of London, and in her late 70s completed four summer seasons as the finds supervisor and ceramic analyst on Nottingham University’s excavation of the Roman site at Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria.
Barbara Hurman during her time in the Royal Signals in the 1940s
Barbara also worked as a technical paper editor for the Association of Archaeological Illustrators and Surveyors, a body she helped to set up, and as an assistant editor for the Medieval and Later Pottery Research Group’s Guide to the Classification of Medieval Ceramic Forms (1998). She was a contributor to a number of papers for the Bucks Archaeological Society and co-wrote the book Pots, Potters and Potteries of Buckinghamshire (2019) with Michael Farley.
Barbara was a twin, born in Thornton Heath, south London, to Charles Sanders, an engineering clerk at Vickers Armstrong, and Jeanie (nee Coleman), a housewife. Early on in her life the family relocated to the Cumbrian coastal village of Silecroft. She left Millom school aged 16, and went to secretarial college before enlisting in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) and then the Royal Corps of Signals as a teleprinter operator during the second world war. After basic training she was stationed at Fort Widley in Portsmouth, where she was on duty during the D-day operations. She then went to Italy to continue as a teleprinter operator in Caserta, Naples and Padua, and was demobbed in 1947, having reached the rank of sergeant.
Barbara subsequently worked in Egypt as a secretary for the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes, where she met Gordon Hurman, a work colleague, whom she married in 1950 at the British Consulate in Suez. It was in Egypt, too, that she gained her fascination with the ancient world.
The family returned to the UK in 1970 so that Gordon could take up a job as an area manager with the Aylesbury Brewery Company in Buckinghamshire, and it was only when she had finished raising her family that Barbara was able to pursue her interest in archaeology by volunteering on excavations.
An intensive period of study followed, with the universities of London, Oxford and Keele. She also began long associations with the Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society and the local Bucks Museum, invigilating, working on digs, organising volunteers, running evening classes and giving talks to local societies.
In her 90s, Barbara made contact with the Royal British Legion, keen to raise awareness of the role that servicewomen had played during the second world war. This resulted in her providing interviews to various news outlets and, more formally, giving a reading at Westminster Abbey in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of VE Day.
She subsequently met her ATS contemporary Queen Elizabeth II when helping to launch the Together at Christmas initiative. She was among a small group of veterans invited to attend an official reception at Buckingham Palace to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day.
Gordon died in 2009 and Barbara’s twin sister, Edna, died in 2018. She is survived by three children, David, Susan and me, three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
