O. G. S. Crawford

Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford (28 October 1886 – 28 November 1957) was a British archaeologist who specialised in the archaeology of prehistoric Britain and Sudan. A keen proponent of aerial archaeology, he spent most of his career as the archaeological officer of the Ordnance Survey (OS) and also wrote a range of books on archaeological subjects.

Born in Bombay, British India, to a wealthy middle-class Scottish family, Crawford moved to England as an infant and was raised by his aunts in London and Hampshire. He studied geography at Keble College, Oxford, and worked briefly in that field before devoting himself professionally to archaeology. Employed by the philanthropist Henry Wellcome, Crawford oversaw the excavation of Abu Geili in Sudan before returning to England shortly before the First World War. During the conflict he served in both the London Scottish Regiment and the Royal Flying Corps, where he was involved in ground and aerial reconnaissance along the Western Front. After an injury forced a period of convalescence in England, he returned to the Western Front, where he was captured by the German Army in 1918 and held as a prisoner of war until the end of the conflict.

In 1920, Crawford was employed by the Ordnance Survey, touring Britain to plot the location of archaeological sites, and in the process identified several that were previously unknown. Increasingly interested in aerial archaeology, he used Royal Air Force photographs to identify the extent of the Stonehenge Avenue, excavating it in 1923. With the archaeologist Alexander Keiller, he conducted an aerial survey of many counties in southern England and raised the finances to secure the land around Stonehenge for The National Trust. In 1927, he established the scholarly journal ''Antiquity'', which contained contributions from many of Britain's most prominent archaeologists, and in 1939 he served as president of The Prehistoric Society. An internationalist and socialist, he came under the influence of Marxism and for a time became a Soviet sympathiser. During the Second World War he worked with the National Buildings Record, photographically documenting Southampton. After retiring in 1946, he refocused his attention on Sudanese archaeology and wrote several further books prior to his death.

Friends and colleagues remembered Crawford as a cantankerous and irritable individual. His contributions to British archaeology, including in ''Antiquity'' and aerial archaeology, have been widely acclaimed; some have referred to him as one of the great pioneering figures in the field. His photographic archive remained of use to archaeologists into the 21st century. A biography of Crawford by Kitty Hauser was published in 2008.

Early life

Childhood: 1886–1904

O. G. S. Crawford was born on 28 October 1886 at Breach Candy, a suburb of Bombay in British India. His father, Charles Edward Gordon Crawford, was a civil servant who had been educated at Marlborough College and Wadham College, Oxford before moving to India, where he became a High Court judge at Thane. The Crawford family came from Ayrshire in Scotland, and the child's great-uncle was the politician Robert Wigram Crawford. Crawford's mother, Alice Luscombe Mackenzie, was the daughter of a Scottish army doctor and his Devonshire wife. Alice died a few days after her son's birth, and so when he was three months old, Crawford was sent to England aboard the P&O liner ''Bokhara''. During the journey he was entrusted to the care of his paternal aunt Eleanor, an Anglican nun who was the head of the Poona Convent of the Community of St Mary the Virgin.

In Britain, he spent the next seven years with two paternal aunts who lived together near to Portland Place in the Marylebone district of central London. Like his father, they were devout Christians, having been the children of a Scottish clergyman. Under their guardianship Crawford had little contact with other children or with men. Crawford saw his father on the few occasions that the latter visited England, prior to his death in India in 1894. In 1895, Crawford and his two aunts moved to a rural house in East Woodhay, Hampshire. Initially educated at Park House School, which he enjoyed, he was then moved to Marlborough College, his father's ''alma mater''. He was unhappy there, complaining about bullying and enforced sporting activities, and characterising it as a "detestable house of torture".

At the school, Crawford was influenced by his housemaster, F. B. Malim, who presided over the archaeological section of the college's Natural History Society and encouraged the boy's interest in the subject. It is possible that Malim provided something of a father figure for the young Crawford. With the society, Crawford visited such archaeological sites as Stonehenge, West Kennet Long Barrow, Avebury, and Martinsell. It was also through the society that he obtained Ordnance Survey maps of the landscape, allowing him to explore the downs near to his aunts' home. He began excavation of a barrow near to Bull's Copse, thus attracting the attention of the antiquarian Harold Peake, who was then involved in compiling the '' Victoria County History of Berkshire''. Peake and his wife lived a Bohemian lifestyle, being vegetarians and social reformers, and their ideas had a strong impact on Crawford. Under the Peakes' influence, Crawford rejected his religious upbringing in favour of a rationalist world-view based in science. Crawford gained an appreciation from Peake for the understanding of past societies through an examination of the geographical landscape rather than simply through texts or artefacts.

University and early career: 1905–1914

Following his schooling, Crawford won a junior scholarship to study at Keble College, Oxford. There he began reading '' literae humaniores'' in 1905 but – after gaining only a third-class score in his second year exams – he switched courses to study geography in 1908. In 1910 he gained a distinction for his diploma, for which he had conducted a study of the landscape surrounding Andover. Reflecting his interest in the relationship between geography and archaeology, during a walking tour of Ireland he had also written a paper on the geographic distribution of Bronze Age flat bronze axes and beakers in the British Isles. It was presented to the Oxford University Anthropological Society before being published in ''The Geographical Journal''. The archaeologist Grahame Clark later related that the paper "marked a milestone in British Archaeology; it was the first real attempt to deduce prehistoric events from the geographical distribution of archaeological objects". Crawford's fellow archaeologist Mark Bowden stated that while archaeological distribution maps had been previously produced, "archaeological data had never before been married with environmental information" in the way that Crawford did in this article.

After Crawford graduated, Professor A. J. Herbertson offered him a job as a junior demonstrator in the university's geography department. Crawford agreed, and served in the teaching position over the ensuing year. Through Herbertson, Crawford was introduced to the geographer Patrick Geddes. Crawford then decided to focus his attentions on archaeology rather than geography even though few professional positions in the field existed in Britain at the time. Looking elsewhere for archaeological employment, he unsuccessfully applied for a Craven Fellowship and for a post at Bombay Museum.

At Herbertson's recommendation, in 1913 Crawford gained employment as an assistant on William Scoresby Routledge and Katherine Routledge's expedition to Easter Island. The expedition had the intention of learning more about the island's first inhabitants and its Moai statues. After the team departed from Britain aboard the schooner ''Mana'', Crawford began quarrelling with the Routledges. Informing them that they had demonstrated an "extraordinary lack of courtesy" and "appalling stinginess" toward both him and other crew members, he left the ship at Cape Verde and returned to Britain. He then gained employment from the wealthy philanthropist Henry Wellcome, who sent him to Egypt to gain further training in archaeological excavation from G. A. Reisner. Wellcome then sent him to Sudan, where Crawford was given charge of the excavation of the Meroitic site at Abu Geili, remaining there from January to June 1914. On his return to England—where he was planning on sorting through the artefacts found in Sudan—he and his friend Earnest Hooton began excavation of a long barrow on Wexcombe Down in Wiltshire.

First World War: 1914–1918

It was while Crawford was engaged in this excavation that the United Kingdom entered the First World War. At Peake's encouragement, Crawford enlisted in the British Army, joining the London Scottish Regiment and was sent to reinforce the First Battalion on the Western Front. The battalion marched to Béthune to relieve the British line, fighting at Givenchy. Crawford was afflicted with influenza and malaria, and in February he was invalided back to England and stationed at Birmingham for his recuperation. After he recovered, he applied to join the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) but was deemed too heavy. He was commissioned in May 1915. In July 1915 he joined the Royal Berkshire Regiment as part of the Third Army, being stationed at Beauval and then St. Pol. Using his existing skills, he served as the regiment's maps officer, and was responsible for mapping the areas around the front line, including German Army positions. He also took photographs which were used for British propaganda purposes, and in 1916 he guided the writer H. G. Wells

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases