ABSTRACT
The growth of archaeology, and with it the techniques of excavation, has been outlined, with many contemporary quotations and a bibliography, by Professor Glyn Daniel (1950 and 1967) and its more recent aberrations castigated by Sir Mortimer Wheeler (1954). Our modern techniques stem from the fifteen years between 1881 and 1896 during which LieutenantGeneral Pitt Rivers carried out a series of masterly excavations on Cranborne Chase (Pitt Rivers 1887-98), where he had inherited estates and was therefore able to work with unhurried care, with adequate finances and labour, but, above all, to publish with a lavishness which we can now rarely hope to emulate. As he tells us (vol. 1, 1887, xix), his first lessons as an excavator were derived from Canon Greenwell, the opener of Yorkshire barrows, but he far transcended his tutor, and dug with a breadth of vision and a grasp of detail which were quite unprecedented. It was this meticulous attention to detail that was, and is, important, together with his realization that all the observed evidence should be recorded, even if its meaning is not understood at the time. Two short quotations will put his point of view:
Excavators, as a rule, record only those things which appear to them important at the time, but fresh problems in Archaeology and Anthropology are constantly arising, and it can hardly fail to escape the notice of anthro pologists… that on turning back to old accounts in search of evidence, the points which would have been most valuable have been passed over from being thought uninteresting at the time. Every detail should, therefore, be recorded in the manner most conducive to facility of reference, and it ought at all times to be the chief object of an excavator to reduce his own personal equation to a minimum (Pitt Rivers, vol.1, 1887, xvii).
