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permanent place in the history of Indian archaeology. Of the twenty-three volumes published in this series between 1862 and 1887, twelve were written by Cunningham himself, two were written by him in collaboration with an assistant, and the rest were written by his three assistants in the Archaeological Survey of India—J. D. Beglar, A.C.L. Carlleyle, and H.W. Garrick. As far as the archaeology of the area between the northwestern hills and Bengal is concerned, these reports constitute a major source of information even today.
The Archaeological Survey of India was established by the government of India in 1861 mainly owing to Cunningham’s persuasion. He became its first director-general/director on his retirement from military service. After four years the survey was disbanded to be reestablished in 1870–1871, with Cunningham again in charge. He retired from this duty in 1885. His main interest in archaeology was topographical, and he followed the routes traveled by Alexander the Great and two famous Chinese pilgrims, Hiuen Tsang (seventh century a.d.) and Fa-Hian (fifth century a.d.), and identified and described ancient sites along the way. Some of the most important ancient city sites of India owe their identifications to him. He was not much of an excavator, but he mapped out sites on a scale that has not yet been equaled in India.
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(1754–1810)
A middle-class cloth merchant who, like his wealthy patron, sir richard colt hoare, developed a passion for excavating English barrows and graves. He lead Colt Hoare’s archaeology team, and with draftsman Philip Crocker surveyed a huge part of Wiltshire, locating ancient sites and earthworks. It was Cunnington who supervised the excavation of some 379 barrows and who ensured that observations were recorded accurately and carefully. He also divided barrows into five types and used stratigraphy to identify primary and secondary burials. While coins were used to date some barrows, Cunnington argued that it was possible that graves with only stone artifacts in them might be earlier than those that contained metal ones. Notwithstanding these advances in fieldwork methods and in the analysis of artifacts neither Cunnington nor his patron Colt Hoare was able to convincingly demonstrate a relative chronology for these English monuments.
See also
Britain, Prehistoric Archaeology
(1814–1896)
Curtius was born in Lubeck and studied philology and philosophy in Bonn, Gottingen, and Berlin. In 1837 he traveled to newly independent greece and visited the site of Olympia, the excavation of which was to become his lifelong work. He returned to Germany and obtained his doctorate in Halle in 1841. In 1844 he was appointed tutor to the German Crown Prince, the future Emperor Friedrich III, and professor of classical philology in Berlin. In the same year he published his most important work, a two-volume description of the Peloponnese, which was the result of his travels in the 1830s.
In 1856 Curtius returned to Gottingen as professor of classical philology and archaeology. He published Griechische Geschichte, which became the most widely read Greek history written in German, republished five more times. In 1868 he moved to Berlin as professor of classical archaeology. heinrich schliemann’s successes at Troy led to German government support of Curtius’s long-planned excavation of Olympia. In 1874 he signed an agreement with the Greek government that not only allowed German scholars exclusive rights to excavate Olympia, but also provided for the exhibition of finds at the site. This was the first government-supported excavation in Greece, and it became a model for other countries who wished to work there and respect Greek antiquities and the right of the Greek government to keep them. Curtius also helped to found the German Archaeological Institute (deutsches archäologisches institut) in Athens.
Olympia was excavated between 1875 and 1881 (and again from 1936 to 1941 and since
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