Antiquity and Britain. (Special section).

Cunliffe, Barry

The birth of ANTIQUITY in 1927 is a well-documented event. As its begetter and first editor, O.G.S. Crawford, tells us it came into being for a very specific purpose (Crawford 1955: 175):

At the end of 19251 conceived the idea of starting a quarterly journal which would serve as the organ of the very live and active group of archaeologists then working in England. We needed such a journal, and as appeared later the public wanted it too. The Antiquaries Journal, begun in 1921, smouldered on and contained some good stuff, but never broke out into flame; that would obviously have been a most improper thing for the organ of so ancient and respectable a society to do. But without flame there is no light, and there was an intelligent public anxious to be enlightened.

Within little more than a year of the conception of the idea ANTIQUITY Vol. 1 no. 1 for March 1927 landed on the doormat. Its readers were left in no doubt from Crawford's first editorial what they were about to receive:

Antiquity will attempt to summarize and criticize the work of those who are recreating the past. Archaeology is a branch of science which achieves its results by means of excavation, fieldwork and comparative studies: it is founded upon the observation and record of facts.... Each article will be but a tiny facet of the whole; for our field is the Earth, our range in time a million years or so, our subject the human race.... Never before has so much been known about the past; never has the desire of knowledge been greater. If the world is our playground, it is also our audience.

And so for the next 30 years, with a simplicity and an inviting freshness, Crawford strove to bring archaeology to its ever-increasing and always appreciative audience.

The contents of that first issue set the scene for what will follow. Crawford himself writes on the drowned landscape of the Scilly Isles while a Wiltshire amateur, R.C.C. Clay, presents the field archaeology of Wessex trackways. Air photographs of Woodhenge accompany a brief account of its recent excavation by Maud Cunnington, while Stonehenge, an ever-popular subject in ANTIQUITY, is considered as an astronomical instrument prefaced by a paper on `Orientation' by Vice-Admiral Boyle Somerville. Two more friends of the editor were persuaded to produce overviews, R.G. Collingwood on `The Roman Frontier in Britain' and Gordon Childe on `The Danube Thoroughfare ...', and finally the anthropologist Raymond Firth contributed a comparative study of Maori hillforts. It was a rich and varied mix, field archaeology, ethnology, air photography, Stonehenge, Roman Britain--all the editor's favourite subjects--and in the notes and news, reviews and lists of forthcoming excavations, much else besides.

The first volume is, as might be expected, heavily biased to British topics which amounted to about half the contents, but over the years the quantity of insular offerings was gradually reduced, reaching only 11% in Vol. 30. Under Glyn Daniel's editorship (1958-86) Britain featured rather larger at 20-25% but since then has fallen back to an average of about 10%, reflecting the increasing world coverage which more recent editors have rightly striven for. Given the constant stream of British archaeology published in the pages of ANTIQUITY over the last 75 years we may reasonably ask, how has the journal served this particular subject area?

Crawford's editorship can conveniently be divided into two phases, the first from 1927 to 1940, the second from 1941 to 1957.

In the first phase Crawford's particular interests predominated. His prime concern focused around field archaeology, the subject which he was later to develop as a book (Crawford 1953). During the first 13 years of the journal he contributed a major paper almost every year, covering topics such as barrows, stone cists, hill figures, field systems, surveys of linear earthworks, and the sites of Arthur's battles. He also encouraged friends to write on the same general themes. E.C. Curwen focused on prehistoric agriculture, prehistoric cultivation at Grassington, ploughs and strip fields and Neolithic camps. Cyril Fox offered a paper on dykes, while Stuart Piggott published five papers, all of lasting value, on the field systems of Butser Hill, the Uffington White Horse, Ladle Hill (an unfinished hillfort), flint mines, and stone circles in Dorset. ANTIQUITY also carried one of Glyn Daniel's earliest papers on dolmens in southern Britain.

But Crawford, trained as a geographer at Oxford, was always conscious of the broader landscape context. He persuaded William Page to write on types of English medieval villages, Wooldridge and Linton on loam terrain and early English history and H.C. Darling on the Fenlands. Interleaved with all this were papers on place-names and Saxon boundaries, bringing together documentary evidence and field survey in a variety of ways.

Taken together these papers form a remarkably cohesive contribution which can fairly be said to have laid the basis of the sub-discipline of field archaeology upon which the work of later historians like W.G. Hoskins and the many archaeologists who have worked for the English, Scottish and Welsh Royal Commissions on Historical Monuments was to be built. This, and the use of aerial photography as a complementary tool to fieldwork, were to be Crawford's greatest contribution to archaeology.

Another of his major interests was in the study of Roman Britain. R.G. Collingwood was wheeled into action from the beginning with his overview of the Roman Frontier, later reviewing town and country in Roman Britain and new Roman sites in Scotland. Mortimer Wheeler was soon to join in with papers on Caistor (based on air photographs), the Dover light-house and Verulamium. He also offered a more general consideration of Belgic `cities' in Britain, as well as a study of the topography of Saxon London and its relationship to its Roman predecessor. This last contribution, published in 1934, drew an immediate critical response from Noel Myres to be followed by a riposte from Wheeler. The two were to engage in combat again four years later, in Vol. 12 for 1938, when Myres critically reviewed Wheeler's excavation report on Verulamium. In his reply Wheeler's anger was barely concealed though the code is elegant. His remark that facts `familiar to a widening circle of archaeologists since the end of 1930, had seemingly failed to penetrate the enviable seclusion of Tom Quad' is nicely barbed. But the gloves come off later when Wheeler takes up the point of dating evidence for the Verulamium Roman defences in comparison with those of Aldborough which Myres had excavated, concluding that `Mr Myres would be well advised to say very little about Aldborough until one or more further seasons there has straightened out this fragmentary and inconclusive piece of work.' By allowing, or even encouraging, debates of this kind, Crawford was personalizing archaeology in a way which brought current issues directly to his readership, allowing them to participate in its exciting immediacy: here was Crawford the journalist at his most creative.

Crawford's interest in ethnology provided one of the leitmotifs of his editorship. Indeed, he was one of the few archaeologists of the time to realize that the folk culture of the British Isles was a significant part of the archaeological record. Fox on sleds, carts and wagons and on peasant crofts in Pembrokeshire, Peate on folk culture and Welsh houses and Estyn Evans on Donegal survivals were among the contributions of those early years, all adding breadth to the vision of what archaeology was properly about.

The second phase of Crawford's editorship, 1941-57 (vols. 14-30), saw both continuity and change. His love of fieldwork and landscape studies continued in strength, though a new cast of younger authors makes its appearance. Hogg, Grimes and O'Neil write on earthworks and settlements while the open fields of Portland and of Devon are treated by Douch and by Finberg. Ethnology also maintains its strong position with a particular emphasis on vernacular architecture in Wales and Scotland in contributions from Peate, Fox, Curwen and Lindsay Scott. Roman Britain, on the other hand, was given less space, though there are useful overviews of northern Britain by Ian Richmond, and shorter contributions on Verulamium by Philip Corder and Silchester by Aileen Fox.

Among the new trends which become apparent is a greater emphasis on reporting the results of current excavations. This begins in a dramatic way with a whole edition devoted to the spectacular discoveries at Sutton Hoo (Vol. 14 part 1 for March 1940). Other sites to be treated are the Lockleys Roman villa by J.B. Ward-Perkins later in the same year, barrow excavations in Wales by Cyril Fox, the Cairnpapple grave in Scotland by Stuart Piggott and, in 1949, the results of a rescue excavation in Canterbury by Sheppard Frere.

Frere's paper on rescue excavation also relates to another category of new themes, appearing in the 1940s, which can be classed together as `public awareness'. The whole issue of rescue excavation was first raised in 1944 by Wheeler in a paper on London after the war and broader issues were now beginning to be addressed. Arleen Fox wrote on archaeology in education, also in 1944, and later Jacquetta Hawkes explored film as a medium for communicating archaeology (1946) and then turned to the question of how to present the origins of the British in the Festival of Britain (1951).

The 30 years of Crawford's editorship covered the period when British archaeology came of age. ANTIQUITY played a significant role in that process in constantly bringing to its public what was new and interesting and doing so with a direct, uncluttered freshness. When Glyn Daniel took over the editorship in 1958 he inherited a much-venerated vehicle but one now facing a new professional and competitive world, through which it had to be steered with increasing care.

Reviewing ANTIQUITY's contribution to archaeology in Britain during the Daniel years, 1958-86, it is possible to detect a significant change in direction some time around 1974/5, but throughout the entire period there were a number of recurring themes, many of them continuing Crawford's preferences. Air photographs were consistently given space, while radiocarbon dating, Stonehenge and Sutton Hoo made regular appearances. Glyn Daniel's own interests in the antiquarian origins of archaeology ensured that space was reserved for Edward Llwyd, William Stukeley, Piltdown Man and Pitt-Rivers, whilst the work of the State sector--the British Museum, the Ordnance Survey, the Royal Commissions and the commercial units--was periodically reviewed. In this way Daniel made certain that the results of archaeology were always presented in the context of the infrastructure which allowed them to be realized. In deliberately contextualizing archaeology he was giving it a relevance to political life--a theme which has become increasingly dominant in the last 20 years.

In the first phase of Daniel's editorship, 1958-75, considerable space was devoted each year to current excavations and new discoveries, in all amounting to 30 or so major contributions. Daniel's particular favourites were there--West Kennet, the Dyffryn tomb, the Wilsford shaft, Wayland's Smithy, Hetty Pegler's Tump, Silbury, Durrington Walls and Llandegai--but so too were Iron Age sites like South Cadbury, Garton Slack, Dinorben, Gussage All Saints and Moely-Gaer, and even a scattering of Roman sites including Old Burrow and Martinhoe, Fishbourne and Bath. Among the spectacular finds to be announced were the St Ninians Hoard, the Isleham Hoard, the Ipswich torcs and the Holcombe Mirror. Taken together these papers are a remarkable reflection of the editor's foresight and tenacity--he had a keen sense of what the ANTIQUITY readership should be served with and a determination to get even the more report-shy excavators to put pen to paper. Some of the site summaries published in ANTIQUITY remained the only adequate account of an excavation 20 or 30 years later, and at least one is still not properly published!

After 1975 space devoted to current discoveries very rapidly diminished: the last 11 years or so of Daniel's editorship saw only half-a-dozen such contributions in the pages of ANTIQUITY. Why this should be is not immediately clear, but one distinct possibility is that with the success of Current Archaeology, which deals almost exclusively with British finds, Daniel was content to let new British discoveries be published there, so that the pages of ANTIQUITY could be devoted to other, wider issues.

A second British theme favoured by Daniel in the 1958-75 phase was the Iron Age. Not only did he seek to publish important new discoveries but he seems to have deliberately set out to capture all the significant overviews that were being generated. The two conferences, The Iron Age in Southern Britain and The Iron Age in Northern Britain, were both reported (1959 and 1962) together with Christopher Hawkes' famous restatement of his ABC scheme (1959) and later, Hawkes' detailed review of the Ordnance Survey's Map of Iron Age Britain (1962). In 1965 ANTIQUITY published Stead on the Celtic chariot, MacKie on the brochs and Alcock on hillforts in Wales. The issue of invasions was raised in Grahame Clark's famous paper in 1966 which encouraged responses from Hawkes including his `New Thoughts on Belgae' (1968). The same year saw Hamilton writing on forts in epic literature. In 1969 a paper by MacKie reviewed the impact of radiocarbon dating on the Scottish Iron Age and finally, in 1974, Terence Powell reflected on recent publications in his `Iron Age Britain Retraced'. In these dozen or so papers, from 1959-74, virtually the entire debate on the British Iron Age was contained. Anyone interested in the history of British Iron Age studies in this period need go no further than the pages of ANTIQUITY.

While it is true that Glyn Daniel's interests in the Neolithic and Iron Age tended to dominate ANTIQUITY's treatment of British archaeology, a number of other subjects, judged by the editor to be of interest to his readers, were introduced from time to time. Environmental archaeology was given some prominence in papers on the Forest of Blackamore, East Anglian sea-levels and the Neolithic settlement of the Fen edge and a more eclectic range of topics included parasite eggs from Winchester and the introduction of the black rat into Britain. There was also a brief flirtation with burials in a group of entertaining papers, authored by Calvin Wells, on cremation, trepanning and (with Sonia Hawkes) a study enticingly entitled `Crime and punishment in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery' (1975). All contained fascinating detail of the kind that the editor relished.

Glyn Daniel's editorship was, by any standard, distinguished. He served British archaeology well, partly because he believed that this was what a high percentage of his audience wanted and partly because of his own personal interests in British prehistory. And above it all was his instinctive belief that archaeology was fun--his aim was to share that enjoyment with all his readers.

Insofar as British archaeology is concerned the editors of more recent years have maintained ANTIQUITY's tradition. Indeed, since 1987 the number of reports on current excavations and important finds has risen again to a level of, on average, more than one a year, much as it had been under the first phase of Daniel's editorship, and there is now a constant flow of articles and notes dealing with current contextual issues, such as the future of archaeology in British universities, the protection of the manmade heritage, archaeology and the government and many other themes both retrospective and forward-looking. ANTIQUITY is now the premier publication for thoughtful and thought-provoking reviews of this kind.

Archaeology in Britain has come a long way since O.G.S. Crawford first `conceived the idea of starting a quarterly journal' in the winter of 1925. Throughout the intervening time ANTIQUITY has continued to serve the interests of British archaeology and to keep its spectacular achievements before the eyes of a worldwide readership. We should all be well-satisfied of this 75 years of high achievement: it augurs well for the years to come.

References

CRAWFORD, O.G.S. 1953. Archaeology in the field. London: Phoenix House,

1955. Said and done: the autobiography of an archaeologist. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

BARRY CUNLIFFE, Institute of Archaeology, 36 Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2PG, England.