Robert Carr Bosanquet (1871–1935) was a British archaeologist, operating in the Aegean and Britain and teaching at the
University of Liverpool
, mottoeng = These days of peace foster learning
, established = 1881 – University College Liverpool1884 – affiliated to the federal Victoria Universityhttp://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/2004/4 University of Manchester Act 200 ...
from 1906 to 1920 as the first holder of the Chair of Classical Archaeology there.
Life and work
Bosanquet was born in London on 7 June 1871, the son of Charles Bertie Pulleine Bosanquet, of
Rock Hall,
Alnwick
Alnwick ( ) is a market town in Northumberland, England, of which it is the traditional county town. The population at the 2011 Census was 8,116.
The town is on the south bank of the River Aln, south of Berwick-upon-Tweed and the Scottish bor ...
, Northumberland.
He was educated at
Eton College
Eton College () is a Public school (United Kingdom), public school in Eton, Berkshire, England. It was founded in 1440 by Henry VI of England, Henry VI under the name ''Kynge's College of Our Ladye of Eton besyde Windesore'',Nevill, p. 3 ff. i ...
and at
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...
, where he was a member of the
Pitt Club
The University Pitt Club, popularly referred to as the Pitt Club, the UPC, or merely as Club, is a private members' club of the University of Cambridge, with a previously male-only membership but now open to both men and women.
History
The ...
.
Admitted in 1892 as a student at the
British School at Athens
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, caption = The library of the BSA
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, founder = The Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, called the foundation meeti ...
– thus an approximate contemporary of
John Linton Myres - he was among the first to lead excavations at the
Minoan seaside town of
Palekastro
Palaikastro or Palekastro ( el, Παλαίκαστρο, officially el, Παλαίκαστρον), with the Godart and Olivier abbreviation PK, is a thriving town, geographic heir to a long line of settlements extending back into prehistoric ti ...
on Crete, from 1902 to 1905. He also served as Assistant Director and then Director, from 1899 to 1906, of the British School, during one of its productive periods as a research centre. He ran other important excavations on newly independent Crete, inland at
Praisos (1901–02) and initiated the School's major campaigns at the city of Sparta on the Greek mainland before he went to Liverpool,
Bosanquet’s first
Romano-British
The Romano-British culture arose in Britain under the Roman Empire following the Roman conquest in AD 43 and the creation of the province of Britannia. It arose as a fusion of the imported Roman culture with that of the indigenous Britons, ...
excavations were as a young man, at the fort of
Housesteads
Housesteads Roman Fort is the remains of an auxiliary fort on Hadrian's Wall, at Housesteads, Northumberland, England, south of Broomlee Lough. The fort was built in stone around AD 124, soon after the construction of the wall began in AD 1 ...
on
Hadrian's Wall
Hadrian's Wall ( la, Vallum Aelium), also known as the Roman Wall, Picts' Wall, or ''Vallum Hadriani'' in Latin, is a former defensive fortification of the Roman province of Britannia, begun in AD 122 in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian. Ru ...
in 1898, arguably better conceptualised, extensive enough and very well published, compared to what had gone before. As part of Liverpool's contribution to then-new Age of the Excavation Committee in Britain that ran from c1890 (
Silchester
Silchester is a village and civil parish about north of Basingstoke in Hampshire. It is adjacent to the county boundary with Berkshire and about south-west of Reading.
Silchester is most notable for the archaeological site and Roman town of ...
) to the arrival of full-time professional archaeological units by the early 1970s, Bosanquet organised Roman military site fieldwork for the short-lived Committee for Excavation and Research in Wales and the Marches, alongside his Liverpool colleague Prof John Myres, at
Caerleon
Caerleon (; cy, Caerllion) is a town and community in Newport, Wales. Situated on the River Usk, it lies northeast of Newport city centre, and southeast of Cwmbran. Caerleon is of archaeological importance, being the site of a notable Roman ...
and Caersws. This work helped set the research agenda for much of the following century. He was a founder-Commissioner of the Welsh archaeological recording body the
, running alongside his Welsh fieldwork of 1908–09, helping to visit and synthesise the archaeology of many counties through the Commission's Inventories and developing an interest in hillfort archaeology.
ortimer Wheeler who knew him and was in a sense Bosanquet's successor in Wales, situated his own early excavations ‘in direct line of descent from those instituted by him and the Liverpool Committee‘.
After exhausting wartime service in hospital organisation and relief work in Albania, Corfu and Salonica, 1915–17, Bosanquet soon after retired from teaching at Liverpool. In his retirement in northern England (Northumbria), at the family home at Rock, he became a respected local archaeologist, but published little of his great store of knowledge on the nature and date of Roman imports north of the frontiers in Britain, Holland, Germany and Denmark. In retirement, he had written to his son Charles in 1927: ‘That the attraction of this place and its tradition is strong, is proved by the curious way in which, for three generations, we have given up very different occupations to settle here; but I think that R.W.B. the parson, C.B. P.B. the social reformer and R.C.B. the archaeologist, would have done better work here if they had spent more of their lives in the North, and had a business training into the bargain …’,. His later obituaries – he died in 1935 – focus chiefly on his character and on his pre- and post-Liverpool activities.
Marriage and family
He married
Ellen Sophia Hodgkin (1875–1965), a history graduate from
Somerville College, Oxford
Somerville College, a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England, was founded in 1879 as Somerville Hall, one of its first two women's colleges. Among its alumnae have been Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Dorothy Hodgkin, I ...
and daughter of
Thomas Hodgkin (historian) and his wife Lucy, daughter of Sarah and Alfred Fox of Falmouth. They had five children:
*
Charles
Charles is a masculine given name predominantly found in English and French speaking countries. It is from the French form ''Charles'' of the Proto-Germanic name (in runic alphabet) or ''*karilaz'' (in Latin alphabet), whose meaning was " ...
(born 1903), married Barbara Schiefflin in 1931
*Violet (born 1907) married John Pumphrey in 1931
*Diana (born 1909) married Henry Hardman in 1937
*Lucy (born 1911) married Michael Gresford Jones in 1933
*David (born 1916) married Camilla Ricardo in 1941
[Bosanquet's wife, Ellen Sophia wrote an autobiography, published by her daughter, Diana Hardman, as ''Late Harvest: Memories, letters poems'' around 1965. After her husband's death, she collected and published his letters and light verse, noted in Reference 1, above]
References
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Bosanquet, Robert Carr
1871 births
1935 deaths
British archaeologists
Academics of the University of Liverpool
People educated at Eton College
Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
Directors of the British School at Athens
British expatriates in Greece