Margaret Ursula Jones

Margaret Ursula Jones (, 16 May 1916 – 23 March 2001) was an English archaeologist, best known for directing major excavations at Mucking, Essex.

Born in Birkenhead, Jones first became involved in archaeology while studying at the University of Liverpool, where she volunteered on W. J. Varley's excavations. After graduating she worked as a wartime postal censor and freelance photojournalist, whilst continuing to volunteer on archaeological excavations around Britain. In 1956, Jones began working for the Ministry of Works as a freelance archaeologist in the burgeoning field of rescue archaeology. She worked at a number of sites, but is best known for her excavations at Mucking, a major Anglo-Saxon settlement and associated cemetery, with finds ranging from the Stone Age to the medieval period.

The Mucking excavation, which Jones directed from 1965 to 1978, became Britain's largest ever archaeological excavation. It produced an unprecedented volume of material, although some academic archaeologists have criticised the fact that the results did not appear in print until decades after the excavation had ended. Jones' work at Mucking, as well as her role in founding the campaign group Rescue, was influential in the establishment of modern commercial archaeology in Britain.

Early years (1916–1956) Margaret Ursula Owen was born on 16 May 1916 to middle-class parents in Birkenhead. She attended Calder High School for Girls in Liverpool before going on to read Geography at the University of Liverpool. Between 1956 and 1965, Margaret Jones directed a number of such excavations in Buckinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire (including Old Sleaford). Jones quickly concluded that the crop marks at Mucking represented an extensive site with Iron Age, Roman, Anglo-Saxon and early Medieval remains. On that basis, the Ministry extended her contract and initiated a full excavation of the site. To keep ahead of its destruction by the gravel company that owned it, Jones, assisted by her husband Tom, directed work at the site continuously for 13 years. Unusually, they excavated all year round, living in a small caravan and employing a shifting workforce of freelance archaeologists and volunteers from around the world. figure: "indomitable, formidable, disinclined to suffer fools but very kind to those she considered worth helping, dedicated and inventive". According to her obituarist Mike Pitts, Jones also influenced the formation of modern rescue archaeology in Britain by demonstrating "dogged salvage excavation on a grand scale" at Mucking.

Academic archaeologists criticised Jones' work at Mucking as one of the prime examples of "excavation without publication". They argued that since the primary aim of any archaeological excavation is "preservation by record", failing to publish the results amounted to destroying the archaeology without purpose, and that it was irresponsible to excavate large areas without the means to properly process and disseminate the results. Indeed, in thirteen years of continuous excavation at Mucking, Jones only published a single, short paper on the results of her trial excavations in 1965. When the project was completed in 1978, despite the huge volume of material that had been recovered, very little had been analysed and none had been published. Ultimately, the final publication of Mucking was undertaken by others (English Heritage and the Cambridge Archaeological Unit), the first volume of which did not appear until 2015, fourteen years after Jones' death. Jones argued that as the site was being constantly destroyed by the gravel extraction on the site, she could not afford to take time out of the year for post-excavation, nor did she have the funding to complete it.

Despite her sometimes fearsome reputation as director of the Mucking excavation, archaeologist Monica Barnes considered Jones a role model: