Reconnecting Thomas Gann with British Interest in the Archaeology of Mesoamerica: An Aspect of the Development of Archaeology as a University Subject

‘He [Thomas Gann] was lecturer in Central American archaeology at the University of Liverpool (1919–1938), and adviser to the British Museum expeditions to British Honduras’ (Dictionary of National Biography 1931–1940 [1949]: 306). Thus wrote the great archaeologist of the Maya, Sir John Eric Thompson (1898–1975), who knew Thomas Gann, the subject of this paper, from around 1926 until his death, and memorialised him elsewhere in the Boletín Bibliográfico de Antropología Americana (Thompson 1940) and the British Medical Journal (Thompson 1975). Curiously, all published sources, including Thompson, are seriously mistaken about Gann’s Liverpool connection, wrongly dating it to the period when it was inactive or had lapsed. Thus, ‘from 1919 to 1938 Gann was Lecturer in Central American Archaeology at Liverpool University, the first Americanist ever to hold a university position in Britain. I have never come across anyone who went to his lectures (I am not even sure if he gave any) and he seems to have trained no students’ (Bray 1994: 6; cf. also Bray and Glover 1987: 119). I shall offer some new archival evidence to correct this. We shall also see that Bray’s conception of Gann as a British, university, ancestor, if an odd one, is unhelpful (but understandable); Gann’s position says as much about the atmosphere of the early years at Liverpool University (Freeman In preparation; James In preparation) as it does about the study of Ancient America in Britain during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Recent historical research in the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at Liverpool (the direct descendant of the Institute of Archaeology with which Gann was connected), by Mac James, our supervisor Dr Philip Freeman and myself, has included exploring the papers of Francis Chatillon Danson, an important early supporter of the Institute. The following paper is based on the Danson papers, now in National Museums Liverpool (Archives Department). In this paper I will introduce the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Central American archaeologist Thomas Gann; explore what his real connection was with the University of Liverpool ‘back home’; discuss some of the difficulties we currently encounter in studying the practice of early British Central American archaeology, and offer some conclusions: chiefly, that what we are really struck by is not so much working in the field in Belize a hundred or so years ago, but the early years of archaeology as a discipline at Liverpool (and England), when its promoters were making it up as they went alo