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“What I want is simple, clear-minded stuff that any intelligent fool can understand.”) This approach is not usually theoretical in a self-consciously explicit way, but still it is not unsystematic.
Contemporaries saw Crawford as a distinctive individualist with a strong and independent spirit. Wheeler told with relish the scandal that echoed around archaeological Wales when Crawford received Welsh archaeologists visiting his excavation wearing shorts—“Thereafter for thirty seven years he was one of my closest friends, and his boyish glee in calling the bluff of convention never left him.” Crawford’s autobiography is full of tales of conflict between his free spirit and the bureaucratic systems of the Ordnance Survey.
Crawford’s later work Archaeology in the Field (1953) shows him drifting away from his early principles, and his last work, The Eye Goddess (1957), is alarmingly lacking in that robust good sense and clear attention to good chronology that before had been the Crawford style. In 1955, however, Crawford wrote a good autobiography, Said and Done.
References
Crawford, O.G.S. 1921. Man and His Past. London: Milford.
———. 1924a. Air Survey and Archaeology. Ordnance Survey Professional Papers, new series, 7. Southampton: Ordnance Survey.
———. 1924b. Map of Roman Britain. Southampton: Ordnance Survey.
———. 1929. Air Photography for Archaeologists. Ordnance Survey Professional Papers, new series, 12. London: Ordnance Survey.
———. 1935. Map of Britain in the Dark Ages. 2 sheets. Southampton: Ordnance Survey.
———. 1953. Archaeology in the Field. London: Phoenix House.
———. 1955. Said and Done: The Autobiography of an Archaeologist. London: Phoenix House.
———. 1957. The Eye Goddess. London: Phoenix House.
Crawford, O.G. S., and A. Keiller. 1928. Wessex from the Air. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(1814–1893)
Alexander Cunningham went to India from England as an army engineer in 1833 and fell, as a young man, under the influence of james prinsep, who had undertaken the task of reorienting the research interests of the members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal founded in 1784. The society was the focal point of European research activities in India, and under Prinsep’s secretaryship these interests veered from mere literary speculations to field investigations.
By the mid-1830s, Cunningham was assisting Prinsep with his research, in particular with the study of Kharosthi, the principal ancient script of the Indian northwest. Until 1842, as his publications show, Cunningham was interested principally in the study of coins and seals—some of them Roman—that were then being found in profusion in the northwestern part of India. He never lost this early interest in scripts and coins, and his publications, such as Inscriptions of Asoka (1877), Coins of Ancient India from the Earliest Times down to the Seventh Century a.d. (1891), and Coins of Mediaeval India from the Seventh Century down to the Muhammadan Conquests (1894), are eloquent testimony to its persistence in his life.
Another major line of investigation pursued by Cunningham was in the area of ancient Indian architecture. He published a detailed study of ancient temples in Kashmir in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1848 and followed that work with The Bhilsa Topes, a study of the Buddhist stupas at Sanchi and in its neighborhood (1854); The Stupa of Bharhut (1879); and Mahabodhi, or the Great Buddhist Temple under the Bodhi Tree at Bodh-Gava (1892).
Cunningham also contributed a great deal to the elucidation of various historical problems related to ancient India, and his analyses of dynastic issues in his Archaeological Survey of India Reports constitute the primary evidence of this contribution. Another of his abiding interests was the study of ancient Indian historical geography based on both archaeological surveys and textual material. This study culminated in the publication of The Ancient Geography of India (1871).
However, it is for his Archaeological Survey of India Reports that Cunningham maintains a
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