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 broadcast, "The Language of Cats", which proved popular and led to a range of fan letters. A publisher in the United States invited him to write a book on the subject, but Crawford never completed it. In the mid-1950s, Crawford began to take an interest in astronomy and cosmological ideas about the origin of the universe, favouring Fred Hoyle's steady state theory about an eternal universe with no beginning or end.

In 1951, an edited volume, ''Aspects of Archaeology in Britain and Beyond: Essays Presented to O. G. S. Crawford'', was published, having been edited by Grimes and brought out to mark Crawford's 65th birthday. Reviewing the anthology for ''Antiquity'', J. v. d. Waals and R. J. Forbes described it as "an exquisite birthday present". Many of Crawford's associates worried about him, aware that he lived alone at his cottage in Nursling—with only the company of his elderly housekeeper and cats—and that he lacked either a car or telephone. It was there that he died in his sleep on the night of 28–29 November 1957. He had arranged for some of his letters and books to be destroyed, while others were to be sent to the Bodleian Library, with the proviso that some of them would not be opened until the year 2000. His body was buried in the church graveyard at Nursling. In accordance with his instructions, the title "Editor of ''Antiquity''" was inscribed on his gravestone, reflecting his desire to be remembered primarily as an archaeologist. On Crawford's death, the editorship of ''Antiquity'' was taken on by Daniel.

Personality

Crawford's socialist beliefs were known to his colleagues and associates, as was his antipathy toward religion. While he became an atheist during his time at Marlborough College, it is not known exactly when he embraced socialism. He placed a strong emphasis on personal self-sufficiency, and openly expressed contempt for those who required social interaction for their own happiness. His adult life was a solitary one, with no family and no human dependents. His sexual orientation remains unknown, with Bowden noting that Crawford's interactions with women were "cordial but not significant". He was fond of cats, and kept several as pets, also rearing pigs for food as well as growing vegetables in his garden at Nursing. A heavy smoker, he was known for rolling his own cigarettes.

Crawford was often irritable and some colleagues found him exasperating to work with. He was known for his lack of patience, and when angry or frustrated was known to fling his hat to the floor in a gesture of rage. His biographer Kitty Hauser noted that "apparently trifling events left an indelible mark on him", for he would remember a perceived slight for decades. Bowden expressed the view that while Crawford "had a quick temper, which he strove to control ... he was essentially a friendly man", adding that he could be "clubbable, hospitable and kind".

Jonathan Glancey referred to Crawford as "a compelling if decidedly cantankerous anti-hero" and an "essentially Victorian eccentric". Hauser characterised him as "a very British combination of a snob and a rebel", also noting that he was "no great intellectual". Similarly, Clark expressed the view that "Crawford's achievements" stemmed from his "moral integrity and singleness of mind" rather than "any outstanding intellectual brilliance". The journalist Neal Ascherson described Crawford as "not conventionally intellectual". Ascherson added that Crawford was "withdrawn, generally ill at ease with other members of the human species except on paper, and suspicious of personal celebrity", in this way contrasting Crawford with his "gregarious" contemporaries Wheeler and Daniel.

Daniel characterised Crawford as having a "messianic desire" to promote archaeology "to the people of the world". He was opinionated and dogmatic and expressed disdain for those who viewed the past in a different manner to himself. Piggott noted that Crawford was unable to sympathise with the perspectives of those studying past societies through a discipline other than archaeology, such as history or art history, and that he could not sympathise with "anyone not as passionately concerned as himself in field antiquities". For example, in one of his publications, Crawford dismissed historians as being "bookish" and "clean-booted". The archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes commented that in Crawford's editorials for ''Antiquity'', he directed "righteous indignation" toward "everybody from the State, Dominion and Colonial Governments, Universities and Museums, to tardy reviewers and careless proof-correctors".

Wheeler—who considered Crawford to be "one of isclosest friends"—claimed that the latter was "an outspoken and uncompromising opponent" and a man who had a "boyish glee in calling the bluff of convention". He added that Crawford exhibited the "divine impatience of the pioneer" and that he had an "inability to work in harness. If he joined a committee or a sodality, he did so only to resign at the first opportunity." Piggott described Crawford as a mentor who "was encouraging, helpful, and unconventional: his racy outspoken criticism of what then passed for the archaeological Establishment was music to a schoolboy's ear".

Reception and legacy

Crawford was much respected by his peers. According to Hauser, at the time of his death Crawford had "acquired an almost mythical status among British archaeologists as the uncompromising – if eccentric – progenitor of them all".
In 1999, the archaeologist John Charlton referred to Crawford as "one of the pioneers of British archaeology this century", while nine years later Ascherson described him as "beyond question one of the great figures of the 'modern' generation which transformed British archaeological practice and its institutions between 1918 and – say – 1955". Ascherson noted that Crawford's contributions to archaeology had little to do with archaeological theory and more to do with "the institutions and tools ... which he bequeathed to his profession", including ''Antiquity''. Crawford devoted little time to interpreting the archaeological record, and when he did so usually embraced functionalist interpretations, believing that people in traditional societies devoted almost all of their time to survival rather than behaving according to religious or symbolic concepts; in this he was typical of his time and was influenced by Marxist materialism.

Crawford was recognised for his contributions to bringing archaeology to a wide sector of the British public. The archaeologist Caroline Malone stated that many viewed Crawford as "an 'amateur's' archaeologist, providing the means to publish and comment outside the restrictions of local journals and to offer a vision of a new and universal discipline". Clark expressed the view that Crawford "always hankered to restore the flesh and blood and to make the past a reality to the living generation", and in doing so helped to attract a greater public audience for British archaeology than many of his colleagues. Wheeler remarked that "he was our greatest archaeological publicist; he taught the world about scholarship, and scholars about one another".
Commenting on Crawford's editorship of ''Antiquity'', Hawkes expressed the view that his "skill in steering between over-simplification and over-specialization has enabled the Magazine to succeed admirably in its role as go-between for experts and public".

Crawford's system of documenting archaeological sites in the OS' Archaeological Record provided the blueprint on which both the later National Archaeological Records in England, Scotland, and Wales, and the local sites and monuments records were based.
In the 21st century, Crawford's photographic archive stored at Oxford University's Institute of Archaeology was still consulted by archaeologists seeking to view how various sites appeared during the first half of the 20th century.
In 2008, Kitty Hauser's biography, ''Bloody Old Britain'', was published. Reviewing her work for ''The Guardian'', Glancey described it as "a truly fascinating and unexpected book". Writing in '' Public Archaeology'', Ascherson characterised it as "full of clever perception and sympathetic insight" but was critical of its lack of references and "occasional mistakes of fact".

Bibliography

An anonymously assembled list of Crawford's publications up to 1948 was published in his 1951 festschrift.

References

Notes

Citations

Sources

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External links

Photo of O.G.S. Crawford
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Crawford, O. G. S
1886 births
1957 deaths
Aerial photographers
Alumni of Keble College, Oxford
British World War I prisoners of war
English atheists
English archaeologists
English people of Scottish descent
English socialists
People educated at Marlborough College
Remote sensing archaeologists
Royal Flying Corps officers
Scientists from Mumbai
Victoria Medal recipients
World War I prisoners of war held by Germany
People from East Woodhay
Royal Berkshire Regiment officers
British Army personnel of World War I
London Scottish soldiers
Military personnel of British India
Sutton Hoo