Alison Hingston Quiggin


Alison Hingston Quiggin was a British anthropologist at the University of Cambridge and the author of the much reprinted A Survey of Primitive Money: The Beginnings of Currency.

Education and career

Hingston studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1899 to 1902. She went on to become a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Cambridge University.

Personal life

As a student she founded the secret Leaving Sunday Dinner Society, members of which would on Sunday evenings cook for one another in a rented room off the college grounds, where they could smoke and otherwise ignore college rules. Of the idea that young women at the university were there to find husbands, she later said "We didn't take much interest in the men and they were certainly terrified of us."
Later, in 1907, she married the linguist Edmund Crosby Quiggin.

Publications

Besides her classic Survey of Primitive Money, she authored Primeval Man: The Stone Age in Western Europe, Trade Routes, Trade, and Currency in East Africa, and was a contributor to the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
She also collaborated with Alfred Cort Haddon on his History of Anthropology and on the revision of Augustus Henry Keane's Man, Past and Present, and later wrote his biography, Haddon the Head-Hunter.