Because it's Harding's personal view and personal experience that's captured,
you get to see behind the curtain of an official projection of archaeology.
The reels are an assortment of varied scenes of archaeological life.
Harding was born in China in 1901.
So what's interesting about this photograph album
is that we have images of him as a child in China and Singapore which is where he grew up.
Then he came to London, got interested in archaeology.
His parents were always living away,
and so I think he tried to create sort of a family among the people on the dig,
some of the workers British and local.
Film technology changes in the late twenties
where cameras become smaller, more portable and cheaper.
So you get a spike in this sort of amateur filmmaking starting in the early thirties –
which is when Harding is making these films.
This is a Pathé Baby film canister
and Pathé Baby films were used particularly for amateur filmmaking.
The cameras would have been fairly small and compact,
so you wouldn't have to have huge numbers of other kinds of equipment.
Essentially, Harding is using the camera like you would use a smartphone.
This is very much whatever Harding feels like capturing.
So sometimes it's a sunset or the way that water ebbs and flows on a beach.
Sometimes it's work which is obviously a big part of what he was doing.
You get a very personal, behind-the-scenes view of excavation life
which is not just watching local people dig in a hole but it's interacting with lots of different people.
While there is a sense of Harding wanting to capture
these moments of exoticism I suppose you could call it,
there's also a sense that he wants those people to be the stars of the film.
For colonial history it nuances the relationship.
Obviously this is a context in which Britain is in a powerful role,
but I think this kind of film allows a local culture to be much more visible than it is in other kinds of contexts.
Harding's archive is is rich not necessarily because there's lots of material but it's fruitful.
One of the things about these films and excavations at this period, and maybe at any period,
is the freedom it seemed like people had
and freedom meaning the British team to sort of explore different ideas and different identities,
even if it's just a woman wearing trousers and leading a team.
What I find really interesting about these films in particular and about archeologists in general
is that they're always crossing borders.
They are always crossing temporal borders
because they're constantly negotiating between the ancient past and a modern context.
They negotiate those boundaries between being British and having this relationship with another place.