ARCHAEOLOGY was not Mary Chubb’s first love but she wrote two accounts of archaeological digs that, reprinted nearly half a century after they first appeared, seem likely to become small classics. She also, according to an academic admirer, “contributed much to the setting of new standards in archaeological publication”. Chubb came from a family that believed in keeping records, and family papers of all sorts which she inherited not only fired her interest in the past but snagged the fringes of history.

With a remarkable memory and a fine, fluent style, she wrote extensively about her ancestors (letter and diaries went back to the 17th century), her immediate background and her early years: about her parents’ Victorian life and her own Edwardian childhood (at school with John Betjeman in Highgate), the Great War and its aftermath, archaeological digs in the Thirties and travels in prewar Greece before tourism took over. Her great great grandfather, John Chubb of Bridgwater, was a gifted amateur artist, a radical and a friend of Coleridge and Charles James Fox. She herself was a young woman of vivid intelligence and unfulfilled promise when, entirely by chance, she took a job at the Egypt Exploration Society to keep herself while she studied sculpture at the Central School of Art. Before that she had turned down the chance of Somerville College, Oxford, after an enjoyable interview, and had taught Latin in a boys’ prep school, perhaps a foretaste of her later passion for the ancient world.

Bored with the London job, she suggested herself as a secretarial dogsbody to a dig in Egypt, someone to free the more high-powered members of the team from the chores of reports and contact with London. But soon she was as much involved as anyone, and picking up expertise on her way. More than two decades later she wrote a book about it: Nefertiti Lived Here is about the investigation of the city of Tel-el-Amarna in Egypt, briefly the capital of the “heretic” pharaoh Akhenaten and his beautiful wife, Nefertiti (surely today’s most famous face from ancient times), and the boyhood home of Tutankhamun, inhabited for only about 14 years and then abandoned, the site forgotten and its memory cut out of official accounts till about a century ago. Like her next book, City in the Sand, it was suffused with a strong, dramatic sense of the distant past that made it seem close to the present: as she put it, “the human touch, a voice speaking down the ages”; the awareness that a seal had been held by a man “in his warm brown hand”, that a baby’s footprint had been left in plaster “hundreds of years before Abraham, away down in Ur, had gathered up his family to set out westwards for his new homeland.”

Ur, in this second dig, in Iraq, was near Eshnunna, its vassal-city which, with an amazing mixture of luck and skill, they discovered and uncovered, experiencing the terror of sandstorms and snakes, the joys of the unexpected, the historical interest and importance of what they found, and the cheerfulness and charm of everyday group life, all of which makes the book seem almost like a novel in personality and pace. It was Chubb’s gift to be able to combine scholarship and fun, the personal and the intelligently treated distance. Her portraits of the others on the digs, in particular the brilliant John Pendlebury, later killed by the Nazis on Crete, are vivid and memorable. but so too are the artefacts found, the excitement of particular moments, the rough conditions. Walking round Greece with friends allows for some beautiful descriptive passages, and everyday life is lit by humour and stylishness.

Five years later, in 1938, Mary Chubb spent a year at Chicago University, which had funded the second dig, writing it up, making her serious contribution to its success. With the war she returned to England, and then came the catastrophe that put an end to what must then have seemed a promising career in archaeology. Riding a bicycle, she was hit by a military lorry, was seriously injured and lost a leg. Knowing she would never work actively again, she took to writing — broadcasting regularly for the BBC, writing for magazines of all kinds, including Punch, and finally writing a series of children’s books on ancient peoples, Greeks, Romans, Assyrians, illustrated by her next-door neighbour in Hampshire, Jill Wyatt, a descendant of the great 18th-century Gothic architect James Wyatt.

Mary Chubb lived to a great age and despite her physical disabilities her mind was sharp and her conversation stimulating to the last. She had charm and generosity and courage, and, spanning almost the whole of the 20th century, she seemed to embody much that had happened in it — from the cabs and gaslamps of Bloomsbury where she was born to the restricted but intellectually free-ranging last years with so much to remember and the sudden, last-minute success of her two books.

Mary Chubb, archaeologist and writer, was born in London on March 22, 1903. She died on January 22, 2003, aged 99.