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(stones with Celtic inscriptions), and some medieval antiquities, and in 1864 he was elected fellow of the society of antiquaries of london. On his return from Ireland three years later, he began his archaeological fieldwork in earnest, and for the next thirteen years he surveyed and excavated in Yorkshire and at the hill forts and in the flint mines of Sussex Downs. He field-walked in Oxfordshire and Wiltshire, he discovered Paleolithic implements and animal bones in the drift gravels of the Thames Valley, and he excavated barrows at Guildford and Brighton in southern England. He also traveled abroad and undertook archaeological fieldwork in france and denmark.

Pitt Rivers joined the Anthropological Society of London in 1865 and in 1868 was general secretary of the International Archaeological Congress that met at Norwich and London. In 1871, he helped to form the Anthropological Institute—he was later to serve as its president—and he became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1876. By 1874, his collection of ethnographic material had grown to 14,000 pieces, which he loaned to the British Museum of Natural History to educate the public. In 1884, this collection was given to Oxford University and became the basis of the Pitt Rivers Museum. In 1880, on his inheritance of Lord Rivers’s estates, he visited Egypt, where he met sir william matthew flinders petrie and discovered Paleolithic remains in the drift gravels of the Valley of the Kings.

In 1882, General Pitt Rivers retired from the army. For the remaining years of his life, his archaeological work was divided between a notable series of excavations at Cranborne Chase, mostly on his own property, and his official duties as the first inspector of ancient monuments. Lubbock’s Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882 provided for an inspector to effect the legislation, and Pitt Rivers undertook seven journeys of inspection between 1883 and 1889, primarily in highland Britain, surveying and sketching monuments.

At Cranborne Chase, Pitt Rivers supervised the excavations of a Neolithic barrow, several round barrows, and Bronze Age enclosures; the hill fort of Winkelbury; the Romano-British settlements of Woodcutts and Rotherley; the linear ditches Bokerley Dyke and in Wiltshire, Wansdyke; and the medieval King John’s house, Tollard Royal. Several exercises in experimental archaeology were also carried out, accounts of the excavations were published, and a public museum was established at Cranborne Chase detailing the excavations and finds.

Pitt Rivers’s fame has rested at different times on his abilities as an excavator, a builder of typologies, and a theorist. He was one of the finest excavators of his generation, and his care in recording information in plan and section drawings rivals modern practice, but he could be inconsistent in its use. In the evidence that he chose to record, Pitt Rivers was far in advance of his contemporaries. He kept most of the potsherds and animal bones that others usually discarded, arguing for their importance for dating a site. He was not a good field archaeologist and not adept at seeing relationships between earthworks, but Pitt Rivers probably did more than anyone in his generation to promote the establishment of a sound chronology for British archaeology through his work behind the scenes in the royal archaeological institute and more particularly by the creation of typologies for field monuments as well as portable artifacts. He should perhaps also be assessed as an administrator, as one who bridged the gap between anthropology and archaeology believing that they were inseparable elements in the system of cultural evolution, and as an educator who had strong views on museum design and display and accessibility to the public. He was also present at, and instrumental in, the first faltering steps of the heritage preservation movement in England.

Mark Bowden

Plymouth, Massachusetts

Plymouth, Massachusetts, was a seventeenth-century colony settled by English religious dissenters,