John Conyers (c 1633/4 – 1694) was a London apothecary with a collection of ‘rarities’, which he opened to the public. During the building of Wren’s St Paul’s cathedral, he recorded Roman burials and pottery kilns that had been exposed by excavation for the foundations; while the channel of the river Fleet was being recut, he observed evidence for glass-working. Conyers was among the first to grasp the basic principles of stratification and of association between objects; he was also the first to recognise that Palaeolithic tools were man-made.

The paper analyses Conyers’s work in the context of 17th-century science and antiquarianism. It includes a full transcript of his notes, which are now in the collections of the British Library (Sloane Mss, Ms 959; Harl Mss, Ms 5953).

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