While Dr Susan Hakenbeck, a senior archaeology lecturer at Cambridge added: “Shout-out to Peggy Piggott, who at the time already had huge amounts of fieldwork experience under her belt. She was not in any way ‘clumsy.’ Described to me by Jenny Price as having ‘inexhaustible powers of leadership’. She was one of the best-trained excavators in Britain.

In 1934, she attended the University of Cambridge and later. Preston’s fictionalized retelling of the story of an archeological dig in Suffolk, England, was inspired by his learning that his aunt had actually participated in the 1939 excavation of an Anglo Saxon burial ship. She reportedly had an early interest in old coins as a child. What I found between the covers of this battered library paperback was a story just as intriguing and charming as the movie. She was an incredibly well-trained excavator by her early 20s. Piggott (also known as Cecily Margaret Guido) was born in 1912 in Kent. The archaeologist tweeted: “For the record, Peggy Piggott had already dug at Verulamium with the Wheelers and Prehistoric Society’s flagship excavation at Little Woodbury with Gerhard Bersu by this point. After The Dig premiered on Netflix, Dr Rachel Pope, director of fieldwork at Liverpool University’s archaeology department wrote how Peggy’s portrayal “annoyed” her.

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