The Excavations
Seventeen seasons on his own land at Cranborne Chase, where he taught Britain how to dig — and how to record.
When Pitt-Rivers inherited Rushmore in 1880 he found a landscape he had known since boyhood but never possessed: the villages, forts and burial-mounds of Cranborne Chase, an old deer-forest frontier ground of the Romano-Britons and the West Saxons, practically untouched by the excavator. He wrote that, retired from active service and incapable of strong physical exercise, he had determined to devote the rest of his life chiefly to the antiquities on his own property.
Over the next seventeen seasons he employed local agricultural labourers in the winter slack of the farming year, with a handful of trained assistants. The sites were stripped entire — not trenched like the old barrow-diggers — every object kept, every layer recorded in plan and section, everything published. His methods were so far ahead of his time that his four volumes are still consulted as the model of what a dig should be.
The method
What made the Pitt-Rivers dig a revolution.
Total excavation
Whole sites were stripped, not trench-sampled. Wor Barrow was removed in its entirety, revealing the timber mortuary enclosure beneath the mound.
Stratigraphy
Every layer, feature and burial was recorded in plan and section, and the sequence worked out with the patience of a surveyor.
Record everything
The broken and the mundane were kept and catalogued as faithfully as the beautiful — the first time British archaeology insisted on this.
Publish it all
Nothing was kept back. Plans, sections, colour plates and physical models were deposited with the public, so any future worker could re-furnish the site.
The sites
The principal excavations of the Chase, in the order of the published volumes.
| Site | Years | Place | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wor Barrow | 1893–94 | Near Sixpenny Handley, Dorset | The most celebrated excavation — a Neolithic long barrow stripped entirely, revealing a timber mortuary enclosure with six male skeletons beneath the mound. Entirely excavated, precisely recorded, and republished as the model of scientific method. |
| Woodcuts Common | 1884–85 | Cranborne Chase, Dorset | A Romano-British village excavated with strict five-foot gridding, every find plotted in three dimensions — the first full demonstration of his recording discipline. |
| Rotherley | 1886–87 | Cranborne Chase, Dorset | Romano-British settlement and cemetery; the pottery typology built here informed his evolutionary series. |
| Bokerly Dyke | 1888–89 | Dorset | The great earthwork frontier dyke, dissected to establish its construction sequence and date — landmark work on linear earthworks. |
| Wansdyke | 1889–91 | Wiltshire | Exploratory sections through the massive early medieval boundary earthwork, published with his characteristic plan-and-section plates. |
| South Lodge Camp | 1893 | Cranborne Chase, Dorset | Bronze Age enclosure and cemetery, excavated with field-by-field finds control. |
| Handley Hill & Handley Down | 1893–94 | Cranborne Chase, Dorset | Hill entrenchment and the adjacent barrow group, excavated and restored as public monuments on his estate. |
| Martin Down Camp | 1895–96 | Cranborne Chase, Dorset | Neolithic causewayed enclosure, identified and mapped decades before modern survey. |
| Iwerne (Shroton) | 1897 | Dorset | His last excavation, undertaken when he could visit only twice a week; fieldwork ends as his health fails. |
| Cissbury Camp | 1867–68, 1875 | Sussex | Early work on the great hillfort and its flint mines — the first of his fully published excavation reports. |
The excavator's creed
“Excavators, as a rule, record only those things which appear to them important at the time, but fresh problems in Archaeology and Anthropology are constantly arising... the points which would have been most valuable have been passed over from being thought uninteresting at the time. Every detail should, therefore, be recorded, in the manner most conducive to facility of reference, and it ought at all times to be the chief object of an excavator to reduce his own personal equation to a minimum.”
“All the villages and tumuli, after being excavated, have been restored and turfed over... and at the bottom of the principal excavations I have placed the medallet drawn and described in the adjoining woodcut, to show future explorers that I have been there.”