J,

ROBERT ERIC MORTIMER WHEELER

10 September 1890 — 22 July 1976

Elected F.R.S. 1968

B y S. P iggott

C hildhood and university

R obert E ric M ortimer W heeler was born in 1890 in Edinburgh. His father,
a journalist with Bristol antecedents, was at that time working on the staff of a
newspaper there; he was, as his son was to recall in his autobiography (1)* a
graduate of Edinburgh University, where he had been grounded in the stern
discipline of the classics under Masson and Blackie, and retained an enthusiasm
which he communicated to his son. Appointment as assistant editor in Yorkshire
took him and his family to Bradford, where his son entered the Grammar
School in 1899, leaving aged 14 in 1904. Here again Wheeler has recorded how
‘by and large my school was of no great moment to me’ except for confirming
his dislike of ball-games (which he seems to have been more successful in escap­
ing at school than many like-minded sufferers), grounding him in Latin, and
above all giving him an opportunity to draw and paint. Scholarships and Oxford
seemed to lie ahead, when his father was asked to take over the London office
of his newspaper, and the family moved again.
In London, the 14-year-old Wheeler was ‘given a map of London and told to
educate myself’, and must at that time have laid the foundation of that intimate
knowledge of London topography which was to serve him in good stead when
Keeper of the London Museum and with which he would delight his friends
in later life. By some means or other he sat his matriculation examination for
the University of London, for which rather than Oxford he was now destined,
before he was 16, and a year later had won a classical scholarship, entering
University College in 1907. Here he read for an honours classics degree, but
the ‘lurking ambition to become an artist’ was still there—a ‘fantastic aim’ he
thought it half a century later, though in fact it was a theme which in Protean
variations was to appear and reappear throughout his life. As an undergraduate,
Wheeler contrived to follow an unorthodox course: ‘I made some special
arrangement’ was his phrase, and here again it would not be unfair to recognize
another leitmotiv recurring in later years. The ‘arrangement’ was to attend
* See references, p. 641.
623
 624 Biographical Memoirs

classes at the Slade School of Art, then under Tonks, at the expense of some of
those in classics, especially those of A. E. Housman, unsympathetic to under­
graduates and to be the victim of one of the few surviving caricatures drawn by
Wheeler at this time (1911), an exquisite portrayal of the ‘aloof and imper­
turbable aspect’ of that arid and acid figure. The Slade was a transient episode,
yet nevertheless significant, and part of the formation, as it was to be part of the
expression, of Wheeler’s complex personality. He took his B.A. in 1910, the
M.A. in 1912, and in retrospect remembered among others in University
College Paul Nash and E. N. da C. Andrade, Housman and W. P. Ker, and at
the Slade, Tonks, Sickert and McEvoy. By 1913 Wheeler had to decide where
his future might lie and opted for what at that time was hardly a profession at all,
and of tenuous fragility as a means of even moderately lucrative employment.
He applied for the newly created Franks Archaeological Studentship, established
jointly by the Society of Antiquaries of London and the University, obtained
the munificent sum of ^50 a year for two years, had it immediately, privately
and charmingly doubled by Sir Arthur Evans, and put up a research pro­
gramme on Roman pottery in the Rhineland. ‘I was to be an archaeologist; but
all else was quicksand.’

‘TO BE AN ARCHAEOLOGIST’
What, in 1913, would Wheeler have thought constituted an archaeologist, and
indeed what did those responsible for instituting the Franks Studentship have
in mind ? In any estimate of Wheeler’s contribution to what over 60 years later
we are calling archaeology, the name and nature of the subject as he encountered
it, rather than what we may conceive it to be today, must be constantly in our
minds. So far as a view was held by the public at large, archaeology was carried
out by lonely and eccentric figures in foreign parts, especially Egypt and the
Aegean (Schliemann’s death in Venice took place in the year of Wheeler’s
birth, when Flinders Petrie was already 37; Evans began excavating Knossos in
1900). It was concerned with digging up treasure and works of art, and was
usually reported in The Illustrated London News. It was enshrined in Blooms­
bury, where together with the Elgin marbles and the winged bulls of Nineveh,
there were serried ranks of Egyptian mummies and Greek vases and, somewhere
out of sight, elderly scholars who occasionally emerged to be quoted as the
authorities in the British Museum. In the universities, the Disney Chair of
Archaeology had indeed been founded in Cambridge in 1851, but here and
elsewhere archaeology was basically classical archaeology, in which Oxford had
founded a chair in 1884, and this involved what David Hogarth in 1899 had
called ‘the propaedeutic training of the aesthetic faculty by the study of style in
antique art’, as distinct from ‘the science of the treatment of the material
remains of the human p a st, which he relegated to the inferior category of
Lesser Archaeology (2). The Society of Antiquaries, joint sponsor of the Franks
Studentship, was an eighteenth-century foundation of gentlemen with a polite
interest in antiquities and had moved very little from this position by 1913, and
 Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler 625

was much concerned with those who were collectors of works of art. Augustus
Woollaston Franks, commemorated by the award, was a British Museum man
with an outstanding flair in mediaeval works of art, elected Director of the
Society in 1857, when a contemporary wrote of the duties of this office ‘The
more of a Classic he is, the better for the Society, since it throws refinement
over all the successive stages’. Franks had read the Mathematical Tripos at
Cambridge (3).
There were virtually no professional archaeologists as such in the opening
decade of this century. In the field a curious and lamentable situation existed.
Archaeological excavation, upon which, as Wheeler saw from the beginning of
his career, entirely depended the recovery of reliable primary information on the
past by other than documentary means, had been transformed from the
amateur fossicking of the nineteenth-century diggers of burial mounds or
Roman ruins to what is immediately recognizable as the approach upon which
all our modern techniques are based, by one man in hardly more than a decade
in the 1880s-1890s. General Pitt-Rivers’s excavation campaigns, pursued with
exacting discipline and published in exemplary detail and astonishing prom-
pitude, should have revolutionized British archaeological excavation and set it
upon a completely modern course three-quarters of a century ago. But Pitt-
Rivers was ignored for a generation and, as we shall see, it was Wheeler in the
1920s who not only saw the significance of his achievement, but how it could be
used as a foundation upon which to build. At his entrance to the archaeological
world of 1913, excavation standards were at once terrifying and ludicrous in
their inadequacy. The Society of Antiquaries had sponsored the excavation of
the Roman town of Silchester from 1890 to 1909; in a phrase much cherished by
Wheeler it was ‘dug up like potatoes*. Leonard Woolley, Wheeler’s senior by
ten years, has described how in 1907 the classical archaeologist, Francis
Haverfield, who ‘intended to take a holiday on the Roman Wall, agreed to
supervise the excavations’ on the Roman fort at Corbridge, putting young
Woolley (who had ‘never so much as seen an excavation’) in charge and himself
visiting the site once a week (4). There were many other excavations of no
higher standards, or worse, and the atmosphere at best that of amiable
amateurism, at worst of destructive ignorance. In such a world the young
Wheeler was looking for a professional job where the profession had yet to be
created.
Of his study tour in the Rhineland we know little, but it is interesting to note
that it seems to have been the only one of its kind, and indeed in his working
life he made little contact with European archaeology except for his excavation
campaign in northern France in 1938—39. The study of Roman pottery typology
was a youthful exercise, not to be repeated. On his return he found a possible
opening in a probationary appointment with the Royal Commission on
Historical Monuments for England, set up as an advisory body to facilitate the
operation of the early Ancient Monuments Acts by listing, county by county,
monuments worthy of preservation. These were virtually all architectural, and
the Commission was engaged on Essex. Wheeler took an intensive evening
626 Biographical Memoirs

course in the Architecture School of University College, adding the discipline

of architectural draughtsmanship to his natural ability and Slade initiation,
obtained the post, and married. It was now 1914, and he was soon com­
missioned into the Royal Artillery and entered with pleasure his first war. ‘I
have enjoyed my soldiering’, he was to write, and in 1919 he emerged as a Major
with the Military Cross and mention in despatches, to return to the Ancient
Monuments Commission as a Junior Investigator.

T he W elsh campaign

It was unrewarding employment, intellectually and financially; it was hardly

archaeology, even by the standards of the day. By good fortune, application
for a post combining the Keepership of Archaeology in the newly created
National Museum of Wales with that of Lecturer in Archaeology in University
College, Cardiff, one of the constituent colleges of the University of Wales, was
successful. For six years (1920-26) Wheeler took up the first of the major
recurrent challenges presented to or sought by him in his life, the organization
of professional archaeology in Wales. That it should have been the Principality
was an accident of time and chance, and indeed one wonders what might have
happened to Scotland if in 1926 he had accepted the offer of the then newly
founded Abercromby Chair of Archaeology in the University of Edinburgh;
we know what happened to India when he arrived there in 1944. In Cardiff,
he became Director of the National Museum in 1924, Cyril Fox succeeding
him as Keeper of Archaeology: his forceful administrative qualities were now
becoming apparent, and what was to be a familiar pattern now emerges in his
autobiography, including the ‘private visit to the Treasury’, a resignation
arranged and promptly accepted, the enlisting of financial support from out­
side. By 1925 the Museum was for the first time not only solvent but flourishing.
This was, however, a part only of the Welsh offensive: more important to
Wheeler and to British archaeology was the attack in the field deliberately
planned ‘to integrate a given portion of Roman Britain by selective excavation,
and at the same time to evolve an adequate technique with Cranborne Chase,
not Corbridge . . . as my pattern’. It was on his Dorset estates in Cranborne
Chase that Pitt-Rivers had achieved his private revolution in excavation
techniques that had failed to inflame his contemporaries, at Corbridge that poor
Woolley found himself in charge. The importance of Wheeler’s contribution to
archaeological technique, enormous and far-reaching, lies in the fact that in the
early 1920s he not only appreciated and understood what Pitt-Rivers had done,
but saw that his work could be used as a basis for adaptation, development and
improvement. The General’s work had not been wholly forgotten in the first
two decades after his death, for field archaeologists like O. G. S. Crawford had
pointed to it with respectful admiration, but by those who were digging at the
time it was misunderstood or ignored, or at best regarded as the expression of a
needless perfectionism attainable only by a gentleman of unlimited leisure and
means. What Wheeler perceived was that such basic principles as precisely
 Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler 627

recorded stratification could as well be applied to a single trench as to a large-

scale operation. ‘The captain of the Hampshire grenadiers’, wrote Edward
Gibbon of his militia days ‘has not been useless to the historian of the Roman
Empire’; the fact that Pitt-Rivers had been a Lieutenant-General was surely
not lost upon Major Wheeler when he and his wife organized his Welsh
campaigns at Segontium (1921-22), the Brecon Gaer (1924-25) and Caerleon
(1926). Here he could combine ‘good order and military discipline’ with his
talent as a draughtsman and his now apparent flair for interpretation—a flair
on which he sometimes relied too much, but at this juncture some sort of
interpretation, however provisional, was needed to provide a conceptual frame­
work within which excavation could be used as a practical means of attaining
intellectual ends, rather than a hazily envisaged ransacking of a misunderstood
past. And at Caerleon he moved excavation out of the aristocratic patronage of
Cranborne Chase and set it, to the scarcely concealed horror of the gentlemanly
antiquarians of the day, into a new world where the public paid—in this instance
through exclusive rights in the Daily Mail.
He was to leave Wales in 1926, with the National Museum firmly established
on its distinguished career and a new standard in archaeological excavation
initiated and demonstrated. But his lecturership in University College, Cardiff,
had not been neglected during this five years of administration and field work.
A series of introductory lectures given in 1922 provided the basis for another
contribution, needed to round off the reformation of Welsh archaeology, a
textbook: Prehistoric and Roman ales, published in 1925.
W
high opinion of the book in later life—‘not a good book . . . scribbled hastily in
railway carriages and country inns’ as he toured Wales advertising to a country
of divided and parochial loyalties that the new museum was something national,
with values transcending the provincial fragmentation of thought and emotion.
He conceded however that it ‘in some measure served its frankly political pur­
pose, as a primary medium of integration’, particularly in view of ‘the utter
negation from which it emerged’. He was unduly (and rather uncharacteristi­
cally) modest. It still reads freshly and convincingly when one considers the
world of British archaeological synthesis in 1925, which was not far removed
from the ‘utter negation’ Wheeler attributed to Wales. Scottish archaeology was
still represented (and was until Childe’s work of a decade later) by Joseph
Anderson’s surveys of the 1880s; there were regional field surveys of earth­
works for Britain by Allcroft and for areas of Wessex by Heywood Sumner and
Williams-Freeman, but for any wider synthesis there was only Rice Holmes’s
Ancient Britain and the invasions of Julius , a literary study by a classic,
or the inaccurate and inadequate Remains of the Prehistoric Age in England by
Bertram Windle (1904). Cyril Fox was writing his Archaeology of the Cambridge
region, a magisterial statement in recognizably modern terms, contemporaneously
with Wheeler (it was published in 1923), but Haverfield’s 1907 lectures on
The Roman occupation of Britain only appeared posthumously in 1924. In his
survey, Wheeler made a clear workman-like summary of the then available
evidence, opening with the Alpine glaciation sequence and ending with (but
628 Biographical Memoirs

avoiding) King Arthur. It is well illustrated, many of the drawings being from his
own pen and setting the new standards of clarity and elegance he was initiating in
his excavation reports. On the last page he makes an appeal for a humanistic
approach to archaeology which he was to repeat thoughout his life, ending wist­
fully that as excavators ‘the clay is sometimes a little heavy about our boots’.
In 1926 Wheeler felt he had finished with Wales. He had set a National
Museum upon its feet, planned, executed and published with his wife an
organized excavation campaign according to novel standards of excellence, and
had demonstrated the potentialities of a school of archaeology in a university.
But he was, as he put it, ‘a young man of remoter and more presumptuous
horizons’, determined to impose a forceful personality on a wider field of
archaeology. Only in London could this be done. Now a well known museum
director, he saw his strategy clear. Turning down the Abercromby Chair in
Edinburgh—there was no point in wasting more time on provincialities—he
obtained the Keepership of the London Museum, a moribund institution
with the reputation of being ‘a muddy backwater with picturesque passages
but, on the whole, rank and tangled’. The reformation of archaeological field
techniques had begun, and he and his wife Tessa, herself an archaeologist of no
mean calibre, had demonstrated its potentiality. The next step in the pro­
fessionalization of British archaeology was clear: the creation of a cadre of
young trained practitioners who could effectively take over from what repre­
sented the Old Guard. A scheme for an Institute of Archaeology to carry out
such technical training had been drawn up by the Wheelers in Cardiff, and now
a contrived challenge repeated that incidentally imposed in Wales. The
University of London ‘had to be led gently into the garden and up the right
path’ with the modernization of the London Museum as the first advertisement
for the New Archaeology in the metropolis, to be followed by a series of
strategically planned field campaigns to reinforce by demonstration the
superiority of the New Excavation.

L ondon and the I nstitute of A rchaeology

The vigour displayed for the first time in Cardiff was now backed by
experience, and proportionately more difficult to resist; latent talents for
organization and adroit manipulation of persons and circumstances had been
developed and were now formidable. The London Museum was reorganized
and jolted into the modern world as Wheeler saw it in the 1920s; the propaganda
embodied in Prehistoric and Roman Wales was given a new form in the
Museum’s catalogues. London and the Vikings (1927), London in Roman times
(1930) and London and the Saxons (1935) were his own work; later volumes
were then to come under his direction from the young assistants he was by then
gathering around him in Lancaster House. Crisp, clear, well illustrated and
authoritative, they made the then recently revised editions of the British
Museum Guides issued from the Department of British and Medieval Anti­
quities in 1920-25 look old fashioned and stuffy. The London Museum, it was
 Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler 629

soon apparent, was becoming not only a public attraction, with such unpre­
cedented features as evening concerts of high quality (provided by a private
benefactor charmed into the Wheeler circle) but also a centre of archaeological
research. By 1934 the Institute of Archaeology of London University was
coming into being with the appointment of Wheeler as a part-time lecturer in
British Archaeology and the introduction of an Academic Postgraduate Diploma
in Archaeology. He lectured to his first few students in the London Museum:
the Verulamium excavations, as we shall see, were in their final stage and the
writer, as one of those students, cannot restrain a personal note in the recollec­
tion of the class assembled, and on the hour hearing the screech of the brakes
as the grey Lancia shot into the gravel sweep of Lancaster House and the
excavator leapt up the steps to appear in time to lecture on the Lower Palaeo­
lithic, or perhaps the Belgae.
The negotiations, the adroit publicity, the private consultations were all in
train, when by an unexpected twist of fate a donation of ^10 000 was offered,
contingent upon the incorporation in any institute of Sir Flinders Petrie’s
collection of Palestinian archaeological material already in store in London
University. The original concept of an institute seems to have been entirely
based on British archaeology, but suddenly a West Asiatic financial inducement
had appeared. It was not rejected. The far greater additional sum was raised, a
building found in the form of St John’s Lodge in Regent’s Park, and the
Institute of Archaeology in the University of London was formally opened in
April 1937, with a rather curiously unbalanced dual allegiance to later British
archaeology and to that of the Levant. In the formal opening speeches the scope
and purpose of the new institution were indicated. ‘If the essential character
of this Institute may be expressed in a word’, said Sir Charles Peers, Chairman
of the Management Committee, ‘it is this, that it is a laboratory: a laboratory of
archaeological science, wherein the archaeologist of the future may learn the
essentials of his business.’ ‘In this Institute then’, he went on, ‘it is necessary
that the student shall find three things: namely, materials for study, instruction
in the treatment of antiquities, and training in archaeological method, in re­
search and in the recording of research.’ The Chancellor of the University of
London, the Earl of Athlone, explicitly compared the new Institute with the
Institute of Historical Research in the University, and the Courtauld Institute
of Art and enlarged on the theme of the archaeological laboratory: the
Institute was designed to ‘fulfil in the study of civilization something of the
function which the laboratory has long fulfilled in the study of chemical or
physical science’. The ‘increasing need arises for the collaboration of the
geologist, the botanist, the palaeontologist, the climatologist, and other workers
in departments devoted to the study of the physical universe’ (5).
In both pronouncements we hear of course the words of Wheeler himself
(the Chancellor, he later wrote ‘had been at pains to study his brief’) and from
them we can grasp both the intended purpose of the Institute and the dis­
crepancy soon to arise between promise and performance. But we must also
avoid hindsight and try to envisage the circumstances of 1937, not those of
 630 Biographical Memoirs

forty years later. What Wheeler wanted was to create for the first time an
archaeological profession based on systematic training to recognized standards
of excellence, this training to be essentially in excavation, the recovery of
reliable primary evidence in the field with the accompanying first-aid treatment
provided by skills in conservation techniques. ‘It is difficult to visualize’, he
was to write in 1955, ‘the primitive state of archaeological techinque and training
in the early and mid ’twenties.’ He was absolutely right. No one had thought
(except Pitt-Rivers) that excavation could be in itself a skill for which training
was necessary: such expertise as might be needed would be provided by a
willing team of navvies under a good foreman, and if more than a rough sketch
was required as a record, a friendly architect or surveyor could always be found
to make a plan, and the fact that he might not know what he was surveying was
of small moment when the excavator himself was likely to be similarly ignorant.
And as for preserving any fragile objects that might have survived the onslaughts
of the diggers, it was felt that wonders could be done with glue, plaster of
Paris and paraffin wax. When Weeeler started on his pioneer Welsh excavations,
it would be fair to say that with Pitt-Rivers forgotten, the average standard of
excavation by the amateurs who alone represented British archaeology was
hardly higher then that represented by the barrow-digging of Sir Richard Colt
Hoare in the Regency.
It looks as though Wheeler’s concept of the London Institute as a training
centre, inevitably linked to excavation campaigns conducted under his direction,
was something more akin to a School of Architecture than to an institute of
academic research in the usually accepted sense; a practical training for pro­
fessional practitioners in the field. ‘It has been criticized on occasion’, he wrote
in 1955, ‘for its emphasis on methods and techniques. Such criticism is praise
indeed; for that is its primary and avowed purpose.’ His aim was ‘to convert
archaeology into a discipline worthy of that name in all senses’, and in the
context of field archaeology and excavation, the recovery of evidence and its
published presentation, he certainly succeeded. Where one can have justifiable
hesitation is the way in which the interdisciplinary relationship of archaeology
and the sciences, so emphasized in the original propaganda, was in fact handled.
At the outset, Frederick Zeuner from the British Museum (Natural History)
was made honorary lecturer in geochronology and ‘the correlation of physical
science with human history’ and he later became a member of the permanent
staff of the Institute. What Wheeler does not seem to have done, in his intensely
personal pursuit of his ideal of a training school, was to acquaint himself with
what was happening at the time in the highly important aspects of what today
would be called environmental archaeology in conjunction with the natural
sciences. In the University of Groningen, A. E. van Giffen had set up, in 1922,
his Biological— Archaeological Institute in which very high standards of excava­
tion were allied to botanical and zoological studies: to many of us in this
country at the time, his record of barrow excavations, Die Bauart der Einzel-
grdber of 1930, came as a revelation of technique and approach. The Groningen
Institute might surely have provided a valuable and stim ulating paradigm for
 Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler 631
what might be created in London, but it does not seem to have made any mark.
But nearer home, the work of the Scandinavian palaeobotanists in pollen
analysis and the relation of early human settlement to the landscape as demon­
strated in natural deposits such as peat and silt was being taken up and de­
veloped by Godwin and his colleagues in the Botany School in Cambridge,
and by 1932 a remarkable interdisciplinary body, the Fenland Research Com­
mittee, with Grahame Clark leading the archaeologists, was in formal being,
utilizing new techniques to build on the pioneer study of Cyril Fox a decade
earlier. Here again, there seems to have been no intellectual trafficking between
London and Cambridge.
While Wheeler was aware of the need of interdisciplinary studies involving
archaeology with the Earth and life sciences, they cannot at this time have been
of real moment to him. Until he encountered the Early Iron Age first at Lydney
in 1928-29 his field interests had been confined to Roman Britain, and although
Maiden Castle, following upon Verulamium, took him unexpectedly from the
Iron Age to the Neolithic of the fourth millennium b .c., his concern was always
with the para-historic periods of antiquity, and perceptibly diminished as the
perspective of prehistory stretched back to those periods, bereft of historic
content and devoid of latent drama, in which palaeobotanical and allied
approaches were first exploited and where they were producing their most
significant results. He was unsympathetic to savages and their undramatic past,
faintly if politely ridiculing Grahame Clark’s classic Star Carr excavations as he
described the excavator ‘extracting with consummate skill the remarkable relics
of as squalid a huddle of marsh-ridden food-gatherers as imagination could
well encompass’. The scientific content of the Institute as originally planned
was perhaps not thought out in the detail it deserved. Events overtook its early
development, but when post-war plans were followed up in 1945-46 it had won
itself a reputation in the University that made it possible for a massive expansion
to be recommended and implemented, with full-time and part-time academic
chairs as well as a Director, and Gordon Childe moved to this post combined
with a chair of Prehistoric European Archaeology from the Abercromby Chair
of Archaeology in 1946, the chair turned down by Wheeler twenty years
previously. With his appointment, the Institute was able to move into the full
stream of academic archaeology.

E xcavation 1928-39
The Wheeler excavations in Wales had been wholly upon Roman military
sites, but in 1928-29 he and his wife excavated on behalf of the Society of
Antiquaries of London at the site of Lydney in Gloucestershire, where a
sequence was revealed beginning with a native fort of the late pre-Roman Iron
Age associated with iron-mining, and continuing with a remarkable late fourth-
century a .d . sanctuary complex dedicated to the Celtic deity Nodons (or
Nodens), and evidence of a final sub-Roman occupation. The publication of
1932, a Research Committee Report of the Society of Antiquaries, set the
 632 Biographical Memoirs

pattern for Wheeler’s excavation reports in future, for not only Verulamium
(1936), Maiden Castle (1943) and the Stanwick fortifications (1954) in Britain
are thus presented, but the reports on his Indian excavations such as Arikamedu
(1946), Harappa (1947) or Charsada (Pakistan) in 1962 are basically planned
on the same lines. Before turning to discussion of the later pre-war excavations
in England, it is relevant to consider this manner of presentation.
For Wheeler, part of the necessary reformation of British field archaeology
was the setting of new standards, not only in the recovery and interpretation of
information by excavation, but in the presentation of the evidence so obtained.
He conceived an excavation report as an integrated whole, with text and illus­
trations in balance and counterpoise, and in a sense a work of art. ‘I would
appeal for a little more artistry in our scholarship’, he wrote in his manual of the
craft, Archaeology from the ,E
arth in 1955, and herein lies the
Housman’s lectures to slip away to the Slade was symbolic of an unresolved
tension, a running battle between the scholar and the artist, which was with him
throughout life. In a sense each thing he did was a conscious piece of artistry,
and it is in this light that we should look at his excavation reports, not least
because it helps us to understand some of the criticisms which began to be made
of them by younger archaeologists from the late 1930s. Artistry can have its
weaknesses as well as its virtues.
So far as draughtsmanship was concerned his reformation was highly dis­
tinctive and very necessary. Pitt-Rivers had initiated and formalized a distinctive
manner of precise visual documentation to be executed by his drawing-office
staff, terse and efficient, calling to mind the military manuals of survey and
field sketching, with a standard range of rather arid and unappealing sans-serif
lettering. The application of a restrained artistry to archaeological draughtsman­
ship, so that a no less accurate record could convey its information with some
elegance, could only be beneficial to scholarship. The Wheeler style was
formed gradually: the section drawings of Lydney are feeling their way towards
the mastery which was to come with Maiden Castle and with the Indian
drawings so long as the draughtsmen he trained there remained under his
direct control. At the beginning he executed all his excavation drawings him­
self; he enjoyed draughtsmanship and in it combined the skills acquired at the
Slade and the Architecture School in London in his early days. His initial
classical training had brought him to Roman lettering from the outset, and he
used it, in a rather affected form, on his student drawings in the Rhineland;
Lydney retains some irritating mannerisms but by the later drawings a charac­
teristic monumental majuscule script had been evolved, and a balance achieved
between the elements of lettering and the drawn detail which is aesthetically
satisfying and immediately comprehensible. He insisted that all archaeological
drawings were of their nature linear black-and-white translations of phenomena
complex in colour and relief, and to that extent subjective, and inevitably
represented an interpretation of those phenomena by the excavator and
draughtsman, and could never be a faithful transcript of an unattainable
reality. In his 1954 discussion of the problems involved in archaeological
 Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler 633

draughtsmanship in recording stratification, with his telling examples of the

‘undifferentiated’, the ‘unintelligently’ and the ‘intelligently differentiated’
section, he is often stating principles which in their wider context of pictorial art
were to be explored and demonstrated by Sir Ernst Gombrich in his Art and
illusion of 1960.
Where artistry might obscure rather than complement and illuminate
scholarship was when the very polish of the report, with the use in the text of a
prose style of elegance, vigour and persuasiveness, supported by the clarity and
stylishness of the illustrations and the patrician typography and layout of the
Oxford University Press, could dazzle rather than enlighten, and give an impres­
sion of questions answered and problems solved with a deceptive finality. The
impatience that led Wheeler to accept the challenge for a set of administrative
problems, to deal with them efficiently and decisively with unsparing energy, but
then to be looking for fresh fields to conquer, could lead to a similar restlessness
in scholarship. To formulate a set of questions on a site, devise the minimal
means for their elucidation, move from strategy to tactics, direct the excavation,
record it and publish swiftly in a form which tied up all loose ends, formed a
compact challenge-and-response reaction which might indeed be brilliantly
effective in some archaeological contexts, particularly where previous knowledge
was minimal, and the site sufficiently straightforward for such treatment. The
Indian episode was to demonstrate the value of exactly this type of campaign.
With the completion of the Verulamium campaign in 1934, where the
immediately pre-Roman native settlement was encountered as well as the
Roman town itself, Wheeler was to write in his autobiography in 1955: ‘For
the moment I suffered from a satiety of Roman things . . . there was an oppor­
tunity to . . . transfer our large and experienced following’ into Iron Age
problems. A site, he wrote, had been in his mind for years. It was no surprise to
English archaeologists in 1934 to hear which it was; we had said for some time
‘Only Maiden Castle would satisfy Wheeler’, and the excavation of this, the
most grandiose and spectacular of prehistoric hill-forts, was conducted for four
seasons in 1934-37. The accidents of war prevented its publication until 1943.
The excavations produced many surprises, not least an unsuspected enclosure
and long mortuary mound of the fourth millennium b .c., and an adroit public
relations exercise gave them a popular appeal which was to play an important
part in the development of an awareness of at least some aspects of archaeology
among the general populace. For all but the last season Wheeler had, as with all
his previous excavations, the collaboration of his remarkable wife Tessa, a
scholar of rare balance and quiet fortitude, and her wholly unexpected death in
1936 was a blow from which recovery was to be very difficult. Between them
over the years they had also created a notably loyal band of disciples.
The Verulamium excavations were the first to occasion published criticism of
his methods of procedure and publication. In a public lecture to the Institute of
Archaeology in 1937 Christopher Hawkes expressed the view that archaeologists
ought not let admiration for achievement blind them ‘to the plain fact—well
known to Dr Wheeler himself—that much more still remains to do’; the recently
634 Biographical Memoirs

published report ‘should be regarded as a stimulus to further exertions, not as

a quietus’. Of Maiden Castle he nicely visualized ‘flying columns moving from
hill-fort to hill-fort, reducing them to terms with all the military efficiency of
Vespasian in the same field’, but pointed out the inherent dangers of selective
excavation when what was more urgently needed was the recovery of the com­
plete layout of one site by total excavation (6). In a review article of the
Verulamium report in 1938 J. N. L. Myres offered reasoned criticism as well as
praise. ‘The casual reader of this beautiful and brilliant book might well draw
from it the impression that it contains all that is worth knowing about the
Belgic and two Roman cities of Verulamium’, he wrote, and while he appre­
ciated ‘the necessity of forcing the account of this extensive campaign of
excavation into the limits of a single manageable volume’ he felt there were too
many unanswered questions not frankly stated as such, and that more detailed
evidence for the conclusions could have been published (7). Wheeler’s immediate
reply was unfortunate, with its ill-concealed irritation at criticism by a junior
and cheap witticism taking the place of reasoned discussion. The little con­
troversy left a slight sense of unease in many persons’ minds.
The Maiden Castle report was prepared under the sad circumstances of
Tessa Wheeler’s death and the shadow of inevitable war to come. Dedicating it
to his wife’s memory Wheeler wrote in 1941: ‘ arma I have no heart for
studentship. The following pages are less a report than the salvage of the report
that should have been.’ But reviewing it in 1945 W. F. Grimes, sympathetically
acknowledging the adversity of the circumstances of production, could not be
other than critical of the handling of the evidence on the social and economic
aspects of the internal settlement of the fort at the expense of the historic
drama embodied in ramparts and war cemeteries. He made some general
observations which illuminate the changed requirements of the scholars of the
early 1940s as against those of the previous two decades. ‘The danger as I see
it’, he wrote, ‘is that we might find ourself faced with “literary” excavation
reports which would lose sight of the fact that they were concerned primarily
with a scientific operation, and would seek to achieve their effect by the elimina­
tion of inconvenient detail rather than by disciplined expression and careful
arrangement.’ He then turned to the increased attention being devoted not only
to broad ‘historical’ conclusions but the social and economic structures of ancient
communities, attainable only by the large-scale operations asked for by Hawkes
in his 1937 lecture and representing a new excavation strategy, more prolonged
and more expensive than the selective Wheeler approach (8). Largely through
his own percepts and practice Wheeler had brought archaeology in the field to a
new moment of change.
Before the onset of hostilities, however, he had in fact made a new move in
1938—39. Many of the Maiden Castle problems it seemed could be understood
by looking across the Channel to the comparable fortifications of northwest
France. Unfortunately the state of French archaeology was such that standards
of excavation and field survey were lower than those obtaining in Britain when
Wheeler began his work in the 1920s; dazzled by their palaeolithic sites and
 Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler 635

intoxicated by cave art, French antiquarians ignored prehistory after the last
glaciation, and as civilized townsmen had never been fond of the open country.
The Iron Age fortifications of immediately pre-Roman Gaul were an unknown
quantity. There was only one course of action open, to send a British team to do
the work, and in 1935 and 1936 two such surveys of material in the field and
museums were carried out by Wheeler and his colleagues. From these it was
clear what the next move should b e : selective excavation on, in the event, five
sites from Finistere to the Seine in 1938-39. The whole campaign was bril­
liantly organized and effectively carried out: the fact that French archaeologists,
amateur or professional, were virtually non-existent, involved the plan only
with cooperative officials at a high level, and made this British incursion into
foreign territory possible. The results, published in 1957, gave a survey of a
critical area of Gaul which only in very recent years is being extended, and its
conclusions checked and modified.

I ndia
At this point the outbreak of war in September 1939 came, one almost feels,
at a personally opportune moment for Wheeler. With Maiden Castle and the
French programme successfully behind him, saddened by the death of his wife
and bereft of her valiant partnership, a totally dissimilar challenge may have in
some measure offered a welcome catharsis. He accepted the invitation to raise
and command a light anti-aircraft battery, which became a four-battery
regiment, and with three batteries he joined the Eighth Army in North Africa
in 1941. He threw himself into his military life with complete extravert abandon;
a distinguished military figure he moved from Lieutenant-Colonel to Brigadier
through El Alamein and the Salerno landing, taking measures to safeguard the
monuments of Roman North Africa on the way, and made a new Army persona
for himself to be remembered by his colleagues in the character of ‘Flash Alf’.
‘I can only confess that I have profited by my wars’, he was to write, ‘I should
have been a fretful and restless man without them. Caught up in them, I have
at least enjoyed something of the anxious stability of the whirling top.’ But
archaeological time and chance were to operate again. In Algiers before the
invasion of Italy, in 1943, his Corps Commander, General Horrocks, brought
him, with astonishment, a signal inviting him by name to become Director
General of Archaeology in India: astonishment because the General had
thought him to be a regular Army officer. Pitt-Rivers would have been
pleased.
In 1902, under Lord Curzon as Viceroy, the Archaeological Survey of India,
originally founded in 1871 and with its roots a decade earlier, was reshaped
according to the standards of the day (which did not of course take cognizance
of Pitt-Rivers), under John Marshall. He retired in 1929 and the Survey
disintegrated. In 1938 Sir Leonard Woolley was invited to examine the situation
and make recommendations for reform, which he did in a report described
later by Wheeler as ‘a monument of quick and penetrating vision and of
636 Biographical Memoirs

trenchant but judicious and constructive criticism’. Mishandled and mis­

understood, it was shelved with embarrassment and consternation. In 1944 the
Indian incumbent of the Director Generalship, by now an obscure sinecure, was
to resign, and in June 1943 the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, asked the Secretary of State
for India for Wheeler by name to take up a five-year appointment as a Director
General who would reform the archaeology of the then undivided India (9).
Wheeler accepted Wavell’s characteristically brilliant choice on the terms of
a six months’ deferment until the Italian invasion was achieved. In February
1944 he arrived, as the almost incredibly appropriate man for the mission.
Terrifyingly vigorous, now entering his middle 50s, with twenty years’ archaeo­
logical and administrative experience behind him, reinforced by an effective
military career from which he had emerged as a Brigadier, he was confronted
with a challenge for which he was uniquely fitted. The state of Indian archaeo­
logy in the 1940s was hardly different from that of Wales in the 1920s, but with
the task magnified to a degree irresistible to his devouringly ambitious tempera­
ment. A Near Eastern tour in 1936, in connection with the London Institute’s
Palestinian interests, had brought home to him the utter inadequacy of most of
contemporary oriental excavation technique, and here he was suddenly pre­
sented with the opportunity of making a momentous demonstration of his
long-standing conviction that the methods he had developed in England and
Wales could equally well be applied in partibus. A substantial piece of the
British Empire had been handed to him as his own; he had the resources of a
State Department and a sub-continent at his feet.
The task had its limitations no less than its potentialities: his was a five-year
appointment only, and independence and partition were in the air. Precise
planning appealed to him, and on the troopship to Bombay he saw two main
academic problems possibly capable of illumination by excavation, the first that
of the blank centuries in the northwest between the end of the then partially
understood Indus civilization (then guessed as around 2000 b .c.) and the
Achaemenid Persian contacts from the sixth century, a period which must have
involved the coming of the first Sanskrit-speaking peoples to India, the Aryans.
In the second place, southern Indian archaeology did not exist, with no pre­
history and a tenuous and legendary past instead of documented history.
Here, as a student of the Roman Empire, he immediately and perceptively
seized on the presence of the recorded but unexploited evidence of the Roman
coin hoards in central and south India. He was to modify this basic plan in two
important directions. The cities of the Indus civilization, though exposed in
formidable bulk, had (like Silchester in the 1890s) been ‘dug up like potatoes’
and were badly in need of interpretation before their aftermath could be studied;
in the south, Roman finds in the event provided the chronological datum, which
then enabled extrapolation into other undated phenomena such as the ‘mega-
lithic’ tombs of that area to be made. Some trains were running, as he once
said, but there were no time-tables.
India called for exactly the powers he could best deploy. A precise scheme of
excavations at specific sites, of limited duration and restricted objectives, was
 Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler 637

called for, demanding his organizational talent and his flair for selection, both
of site and of features of significance within it; his skill in conducting the type of
excavation which would economically extract and interpret a stratified sequence,
and his ability to produce a published report at high standards of presentation
in a reasonable time. One thing was lacking, an efficient and trained staff. With
ruthless vigour a ‘shattering budget’ was submitted to the Indian government,
a large number of resignations were submitted by members of staff, and an
intensive training school in excavation methods for sixty young students was
set up on the great site of Taxila in the northwest (extensively and unintel-
ligently dug into between 1912 and 1934). He arrived in February and the
strenuous archaeological crash course ran for six months from October in that
year. The interval had been spent in extensive travel in search of sites and of
revision of the original forward planning in response to an intensive self-
imposed training in Indian archaeology in libraries and the field: his capacity for
mastering a new subject was phenomenal, as the writer, in India on military
intelligence duties and closely in contact with Wheeler, had every reason to
observe and admire. To the field training he added that of photography and
the drawing-office, with publication in view, and by 1946 the first Indian
excavation report in a modern idiom was published in a newly founded journal,
Ancient Ia
ndi, under his rigorous editorship and containing in the main reports
written by himself. By 1948 he had published three major excavations, but
the journal did not long survive his return to England and two campaigns in the
northwest, the training dig in the Bhir Mound at Taxila in 1944 45 and a
reinvestigation of Mohenjo-daro to be undertaken in 1950 while he was
Archaeological Adviser to Pakistan, have failed to be published by those to
whom the work was delegated.
Success was immediate and dramatic, with the identification in 1945 of a
Roman trading station on the southeast coast near Pondicherry, with imported
Arretine pottery of the first century a .d . ; this Arikamedu excavation produced
not only a local dated sequence but characteristic native pottery types which
enabled a chronology to be established elsewhere, at Brahmagiri, Chandravalli
and Sisupalgar in 1947. In the intervening years he established for the first time
the existence of massive fortifications and a defended citadel at Harappa, one of
the two great towns of the Indus civilization of ca. 2500-1500 b .c. (and in 1950
demonstrated the existence of a communal granary and citadel at the counter­
part city, Mohenjo-daro), thus profoundly modifying the previous concepts of
the social and political structure of the civilization. In August 1947 came
Partition and civil war, and the end of Wheeler’s onslaught on Indian archaeology
except for the 1950 season at Mohenjo-daro, undertaken partly as a training
school under the terms of his appointment as Archaeological Adviser to
Pakistan, and a short season in 1958 at Charsada near Peshawar. The Aryans,
the identification of whose archaeology was a point in his original programme
of research, had so far eluded him, and here an 18 metre high ‘tell’ at the very
entrance to India might be expected to produce a stratified sequence back into
prehistory, but in fact its earliest levels were no earlier than the sixth century
 638 Biographical Memoirs

b .c. He returned to England and to a chair of the Archaeology of the Roman

Provinces in the University of London in 1948, concurrently advising Pakistan.
His Five thousand years of Pakistan (1950) was, as its title makes clear, admittedly
propaganda, but the supplementary volume to the Cambridge History of India
on The Indus ,civlzaton first appearing in 1953, was a substantial contribution
to scholarship, and Early India and Pakistan (1959) a workman-like summary.
Reform had been followed by public information, as with Wales and the
London Museum.
The Indian episode was certainly the most remarkable archaeological
achievement of his career, an enormous challenge accepted and surmounted in
the autocratic and authoritarian terms within which he could best deploy his
powers as administrator and excavator. No other archaeologist of the time, it
seems fair to remark, could have come near to attaining his command of
incisive strategy and often ruthless tactics which won him the bewildered
admiration and touching devotion of his Indian staff; on a return visit at the age
of 82 he was everywhere received with loving acclaim and semi-divine honours.
Official recognition came with the C.I.E. in 1947, the K.C.I.E. in 1952;
honorary degree from universities in England, Wales, Ireland and India, and
Fellowship of the British Academy in 1941. But his return to London in 1948
marked more than the conclusion of an extraordinary oriental episode, it saw
the re-entry of his forceful character into British archaeology. He had another
career in front of him.

T he B ritish A cademy
His tenure of the part-time chair of the Archaeology of the Roman Provinces
from 1948 to 1955 can only be regarded as an incidental episode, though no
neglible one. Temperamentally he was no academic, and knew it; fully cognizant
of the name and nature of scholarship he was too intelligent not to realize how
best to make his own unique contribution to it and its furtherance. His small
semi-popular book, Rome beyond the Imperial frontiers (1954), has a freshness
and immediacy springing from first-hand experience of the fringes of the
Empire from Segontium to Arikam.edu, and it has above all an oecumenical
viewpoint welcome and rare in a field where Roman studies are all too often not
only provincial, but parochial. He carried out one more excavation in England, a
deliberately limited and selective operation on the great fortification complex of
Stanwick in Yorkshire, in 1951-52. Here he was able to demonstrate a sequence
of defences which could plausibly enough be related to the circumstances
recorded by Tacitus of the final rallying of the Brigantes at the time of the
Roman advance north in a .d . 70: exactly the dramatic setting he most enjoyed.
But another opportunity for adventure and reform presented itself in London in
the form of the British Academy (10).
Wheeler recorded in 1970 something of what happened over the two decades
following his appointment in 1949 as part-time Secretary to the Academy.
Founded with the best of scholarly intentions and the worst of academic
 Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler 639

ineptitude in 1901, the British Academy had become all too soon an alarming
example of an institution that had unhappily drifted into senility without even
the excuse of being venerable. Wheeler appositely quoted Beatrice Webb’s
comments on her election as a Fellow in 1932—‘a funny little body of elderly
and aged men’ that ‘gave a lifeless and derelict impression’. Fifteen or so years
later and in the post-war climate of opinion, it was even more grotesquely
inadequate, but prompted by the vigorous plain speaking of one of its Fellows,
Sir Charles Webster, vital internal reforms were made, resulting in the resigna­
tion of that ‘very elderly gentleman’, Sir Frederic Kenyon, from the Secretary­
ship, and Wheeler’s appointment in his stead. It was an inspired choice of one
who had displayed remarkable talents in dealing with faltering or moribund
institutions over a quarter-century: the National Museum of Wales, the
London Museum, the Archaeological Survey of India. And here not only
archaeology was concerned, but something greater and incomparably more
important, the effective future of research in the humanities, parallel to that
guided and sponsored by the Royal Society for the world of science. Webster
became President in 1950, and worked vigorously with the new Secretary
towards reformation, first in the reduction of the average age of the Fellowship
(over 20 per cent of the Fellows were over 75) and the reconstruction of a
council which had become a self-perpetuating gerontocracy. The main problem
could then be faced, government finance and effective relations between Whitehall,
the Academy and the British schools and institutes abroad. The phrase of 1924
comes to mind—‘a private visit to the Treasury’—and there were now to be
many such. The schools were one by one put on a more appropriate financial
footing and the Academy itself moved steadily towards a position of overall
administration of research funds for the humanities, attracting money from
outside foundations and increasingly direct from government funds. The
decisive moment came in 1962 under the presidency of Sir Maurice Bowra,
when Wheeler after a critical meeting ‘left the Treasury with an initial grant of
,£25 000 a year and the avowed intention of a rise to ,£50 000 at an early date’.
Thenceforward the British Academy was set on a modern course. Close
cooperation was maintained from the beginning with the Royal Society,
especially in prehistoric archaeology, where as Wheeler saw, the increasing
application of techniques within the sciences was leading to a position in which
a really fruitful interdisciplinary approach involving both institutions could be
demonstrated and maintained. He devoted twenty years to what might in
retrospect, and in the wider perspective of the world of learning as a whole, be
thought ultimately his greatest contribution to British humane scholarship.
At all events it was a formidable achievement, not the less so as having been
the work of a man in his sixties and seventies, retiring from the secretaryship
as he did in his eightieth year. In 1968, in recognition of his life’s work, he was
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society under the exceptional terms laid down in
Statute 12.
Over the post-war years he continued as a dominating figure, his masterful
personality effectively impinging on almost all aspects of British archaeology.
640 Biograhpical Memoirs

He became President of the Society of Antiquaries of London, which had

awarded him its Gold Medal in 1944, from 1954 to 1959; he was Chairman of
the Ancient Monuments Board for England 1964—66 and a Trustee of the
British Museum from 1963. And, quite by chance, he suddenly became famous
outside the world of scholarship to the British public at large as the embodiment
of popular archaeology through the medium of television. He had always
attached great importance to the archaeologist’s obligation to the public, on
whose support the prosecution of his subject ultimately depended. He did not
know that the wise and percipient Lord Abercromby, in founding the
Edinburgh Chair of Archaeology he was offered in 1926, had expressed his
wish that its holder should ‘impart his acquired knowledge not only to his
classes, but to a wider audience through the medium of the Press and other­
wise’, but, as he put it, informed popularization ‘may be regarded as a scientific
no less than a social duty on the part of the modern archaeologist’. He wrote
this in 1941, in his Maiden Castle report, and in the mid-1950s his appearance
on a television quiz programme, ‘Animal, vegetable, mineral’, was an immediate
success. His artistry always included a keen sense of drama, and he was a
natural showman with more than a little vanity; his intense vitality was coupled
with an arresting physical appearance, with the military moustache carrying a
distinct hint of the ‘Flash Alf’ of the desert campaign. The British public
found him irresistible, exactly the picaresque figure it needed, professor and
brigadier combined, and voted Sir Mortimer Wheeler Television Personality
of the Year. It was a valuable exercise in public relations of which he enjoyed
every moment.
When one looks at the history of archaeology in Britain as a whole, one can
see Wheeler, with all his exceptional qualities, as an outstanding example of a
type familiar in the history of many scientific and human disciplines, a figure
appropriate to what may be thought of as their heroic age. Although archaeology
in this country saw its real beginnings in the same scientific revolution of the
seventeenth century that brought into being the Royal Society (and indeed
with such as John Aubrey within the early Fellowship itself), its development
from antiquarianism to a more stringent intellectual discipline was far slower
and more retarded than the comparatively rapid maturity achieved by other
fields of enquiry into the past, such as geology and palaeontology. The major
inhibiting factor was the lack of any adequate technical procedure for obtaining
reliable primary data by excavation, resulting (with other causes) in a period of
stagnation for a full two centuries: the excavations of the later nineteenth
century had made no technical advance over those of the Restoration.
Archaeology was a slow developer, and its childhood was a protracted one.
lasting for a period with its end almost embarrassingly near to our own day,
and when change did begin it was brought about, as in so many other fields at
this stage of growth, by the early heroes of the discipline, often autocratic, often
alone, and sometimes, by the modern standards they themselves helped to
create, misguided. Among those who realized the nature of the barriers of
advance in archaeology early in this century, Wheeler surely takes his place,
 Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler 641

following Pitt-Rivers, as the great innovator in field techniques, just as his

contemporary Gordon Childe saw the need for and set about constructing a
conceptual framework for the ancient past.

The photograph is by G. Argent.

R eferences
(1) Still digging: interleaves from an antiquary's notebook. London, 1955. Unless other­
wise specified, all biographical references are to this book.
(2) Quoted by G. Daniel, Cambridge and the back looking curiosity, Inaugural Lecture,
p. 7. Cambridge, 1976.
(3) Joan Evans, A history of the Society of Antiquaries, p. 293. Oxford, 1956.
(4) C. L. Woolley, Spadework, p. 14. London, 1953.
(5) Univ. London Inst. Arch. First Annual Report, pp. 9-13, 1938.
(6) C. F. C. Hawkes, Univ. London Inst. Arch First Annual Report, pp. 47-69, 1938.
(7) J. N. L. Myres, Antiq. 12, 16-25, 1938.
(8) W. F. Grimes, Antiq. 19, 6-10, 1945.
(9) For the Indian episode, Still digging, and M y archaeological mission to India and
Pakistan. London, 1976.
(10) The British Academy 1949-68. London, 1970.

S elected bibliography
Books
1923 Segontium and the Roman occupation of Wales (Y Cymmrodor 33). London.
1925 Prehistoric and Roman Wales. Oxford.
Roman Wales. Oxford.
1926 The Roman Fort near Brecon, (Y Cymmrodor 37). London.
1927 London and the Vikings (London Museum Catalogue). London.
1930 London in Roman Times (London Museum Catalogue). London.
1932 Report on the excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman and Post-Roman site in Lydney
Park, Gloucestershire (Soc. Ant. Lond. Research Committee Report). London.
1935 London and the Saxons (London Museum Catalogue). London.
1936 Verulamium: a Belgic and two Roman cities. (Soc. Ant. Lond. Research Committee
Report). London.
1943 Maiden Castle, Dorset (Soc. Ant. Lond. Research Committee Report). London.
1950 Five thousand years of Pakistan. London.
1953 The Indus civilization (Cambridge History of India Supp. Vol.). Cambridge
(second ed. 1960, third ed. 1968).
1954 The Stanwick fortifications, North Riding of Yorkshire (Soc. Ant. Lond. Research
Report). London.
Archaeology fron the Earth. Oxford.
Rome beyond the imperial frontiers. London.
1955 Still digging. London.
1957 Hill forts of Northern France (Soc. Ant. Lond. Research Report). London.
1959 Early India and Pakistan. London (revised ed. 1968).
1962 Charsada: a metropolis of the North-west Frontier (Government of Pakistan and
British Academy). London.
1964 Roman art and architecture. London.
1966 Alms for oblivion: an antiquary's notebook. London.
 642 Biographical Memoirs

1968 Flames over Persepolis. London.

1970 The British Academy, 1949-1968. London.
1976 M y archaeological mission to India and Pakistan. London.

Papers
1922 Roman Cardiff: supplementary notes. Antiq. J. 2, 361-370.
1928 A ‘Romano-Celtic’ temple at Harlow. Antiq. jf. 8, 300-326.
1929 A Roman light-house at Dover, Arch.J. 86, 29-46.
A Roman pipe-burial from Caerleon, Antiq. 9, 1-7.
‘Old England’, Brentford, Antiq. 3, 20-32.
Caistor, and a Comment. Antiq. 3 , 182-187.
1930 Mr Collingwood and Mr Randall: a note. Antiq. 4 , 91-95.
1932 A Prehistoric metropolis: the first Verulamium. Antiq. 6, 133-147
The paradox of Celtic art. Antiq. 6, 292—300.
1933 Belgic cities of Britain. Antiq. 7, 21-35.
1934 The topography of Saxon London. Antiq. 8, 290-302.
Mr Myres on Saxon London: a reply. Antiq. 8, 443-447.
London and the Grim’s ditches. Antiq. J. 14, 254-263.
1938 Verulamium again. Antiq. J. 18, 137-141.
Mr Myres on Verulamium. Antiq. 12, 210-217.
1939 Iron Age camps in Northwestern France and Southeastern England. Antiq. 13,
58-79.
1946 Arikamedu: an Indo-Roman trading station on the east coast of India. Ancient
India 2, 17-124.
1947 Harappa 1946: the defences and cemetery R 37. Ancient India 3, 58-130.
Brahmagiri and Chandravalli, 1947. Megalithic and other cultures in the Chital-
drug District, Mysore State. Ancient India 4 , 179-310.
Archaeology in Afghanistan. Antiq. 21, 57-65.
1949 Romano-Buddhist art: an old problem re-stated. Antiq. 23, 4-19.
1950 What Matters in Archaeology ? Antiq. 24, 122-130.
1951 Roman contact with India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, in W. F. Grimes (ed.),
Aspects of Archaeology, pp. 345-381. London, 1951.
1952 Archaeology and the transmission of ideas, Antiq. 26, 180-192.
1953 An early Iron Age ‘beach-head’ at Lulworth. Antiq. J. 33, 1—13.
1956 The first towns ? Antiq. 30, 132-136.
1962 Size and Baalbek. Antiq. 36, 6-9.