Ivor Noel Hume – författare

“A delight. All the Best Rubbish is one of those rare volumes that both instruct and entertain. I recommend it to any collector.” —Harold L. Peterson, Chief Curator, US National Park Service

Ivor Noel Hume, the former chief archaeologist of Colonial Williamsburg, offers a delightful, anecdotal, and informative celebration of the joys of collecting. 

In his newly revised edition, All the Best Rubbish traces the fascinating history of collecting from its recorded beginnings and describes the remarkable detective work that goes into establishing the probable facts about uncovered and often underappreciated treasures. Now expanded with hints, tips, and helpful information about antique-hunting online, All the Best Rubbish is the ideal book for the antiquarian or amateur.

Noël Hume has pursued bottles, pottery, clocks, and coins through junk shops, street markets, attics, and cellars on two continents. He''s unearthed the most fascinating—and valuable—rubbish from the most unlikely places: the shores of the Thames in London; the lagoons of the Caribbean; the bottom of Martha Washington''s well. Hume knows everything that''s worth knowing about collecting—why we do it, what we can find, where we can find it, and what we can learn from it.

Ivor Noël Hume has devoted his life to uncovering countless lives that came before him. In A Passion for the Past the world-renowned archaeologist turns to his own life, sharing with the reader a story that begins amid the bombed-out rubble of post–World War II London and ends on North Carolina’s Roanoke Island, where the history of British America began. Weaving the personal with the professional, this is the chronicle of an extraordinary life steered by coincidence scarcely believable even as fiction.

Born into the good life of pre-Depression England, Noël Hume was a child of the 1930s who had his silver spoon abruptly snatched away when the war began. By its end he was enduring a period of Dickensian poverty and clinging to aspirations of becoming a playwright. Instead, he found himself collecting antiquities from the shore of the river Thames and, stumbling upon this new passion, becoming an "accidental" archaeologist.

From those beginnings emerged a career that led Noël Hume into the depths of Roman London and, later, to Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg, where for thirty-five years he directed its department of archaeology. His discovery of nearby Martin’s Hundred and its massacred inhabitants is perhaps Noël Hume’s best-known achievement, but as these chapters relate, it was hardly his last, his pursuit of the past taking him to such exotic destinations as Egypt, Jamaica, Haiti, and to shipwrecks in Bermuda.

When the author began his career, historical archaeology did not exist as an academic discipline. It fell to Noël Hume’s books, lectures, and television presentations to help bring it to the forefront of his profession, where it stands today. This story of a life, and a career, unlike any other reveals to us how the previously unimagined can come to seem beautifully inevitable.