The Mercer deposit

The deposit was carried in by the depositor himself in a single crate, unlisted, with the site books packed loose on top of the photographic material. He sat with the keeper of the register while she listed it, corrected two of her entries, and left the same afternoon. The accession runs to a page and a half and is mostly her hand.

Mercer excavated and recorded burial grounds, and worked for much of his career on the documentation of sites that were being cleared rather than studied. The deposit is confined to one such clearance and its aftermath: a site book, a photographic register, a page of measurements, one interview on tape, and a letter written some years later about what he had failed to record.

The site is identified in the papers by a survey number and by no other name. The Institute has not sought to identify it and has not been asked to.

What is not held: the photographs. The register lists ninety-one exposures and the deposit contains none of them. The depositor stated, and the accession records him stating, that the negatives were with the contracting authority and that he had never had them.