Background

Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers was born at Hope Hall, Yorkshire on 14 April 1827 into a wealthy landowning family. He was the son of William Lane-Fox and Lady Caroline Douglas. His uncles George Douglas, 17th Earl of Morton, George Lane-Fox and Sackville Lane-Fox were prominent personalities. It was not till 1880 that he assumed the name of Pitt-Rivers, on inheriting the Dorsetshire and Wiltshire estates of his great-uncle, the second Lord Rivers.

Education

Pitt-Rivers was trained as a soldier in Sandhurst Military College, saw service in the Crimea and India, and specialized in the development of firearms. His main work was on the use and improvement of the rifle, and he was commandant of the Hythe school of musketry.

In 1886 he received an Honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree from the University of Oxford.

Career

In 1845 Pitt-Rivers received a commission in the grenadier guards, and in 1882 he became a lieutenant-general. Sometime during 1850-1851 Fox became involved in the testing of rifled weapons. In 1852 he was asked to instruct the 2nd Battalion of the Grenadier Guards on the drill with the rifle and in the same year, he was sent to France, Belgium, and Piedmont (Italy) to study their methods of musketry instruction. In 1853 the new School of Musketry was established at Hythe in Kent and in the summer Fox moved there with his new wife. He wrote the first edition of the Instruction of Musketry, though this was contested with his senior officer, Colonel Hay.

On 5 March 1854 Fox arrived at Malta with the 3rd Battalion, Grenadier Guards. Malta was a staging post for soldiers on their way to Crimea. He sailed to Scutari on 22 April 1854 and was stationed in Bulgaria with the post of Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General. A quartermaster was a "regimental officer with the duties of administering barracks, laying out camps, and looking after rations, ammunition, and other supplies".

He took part in the battle of Alma, the only major military action he saw. In December he was promoted to Brevet Major for distinguished service in the field. On 15 October 1854, a medical examination pronounced him unfit for service. He therefore saw only a month of active service in the Crimea. By 9 November 1854 Fox had returned to London. In May 1855 he returned to Malta and was apparently involved in training and testing, though he was criticized by Hay for his training. Promoted to Captain and with the purchased rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in May 1857, he returned to the United Kingdom in early August 1957. In 1860 Fox attempted to defend himself against Hay’s criticism and an inquiry was held. He was cleared by the end of 1861.

In 1861 Fox was sent to Canada on ‘special service’. In August 1862 he was appointed Assistant Quartermaster General for the southern district of Ireland at Cork. He was there until 1866. In July 1867 (at the age of 40) he went on half-pay and was free of military duties for the next 6 years, still holding the rank of Colonel.

In 1873 he resumed full-time soldiering, taking command of the West Surrey Brigade Depot in Guildford. Promotion to Major-General was gazetted in October 1877. In 1878 he returned to London. Although, as I earlier mentioned, Fox did continue a half-life as an Army man, really his active career ended in 1877 or just shortly before he inherited his estate. He formally retired in 1882, at the age of fifty-five.

His wide travels and his special military interest in the evolution of firearms drove him to acquire all kinds of artifacts, and to an interest in the comparative study of the material culture of primitive and prehistoric societies. His private collections - which soon outgrew his own house - were temporarily housed in the Bethnal Green and South Kensington museums; in 1883 they were moved to the specially created Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford. But by then he had started a fresh collection that was housed at Farnham in Dorset. The artifacts were arranged in typological sequences, and Pitt-Rivers was one of the chief nineteenth-century exponents of the very valuable typological method for the study of prehistoric artifacts.

When Pitt-Rivers succeeded to the Rivers estates, he took up residence in Dorset and set to work excavating sites - which included villages, farmsteads, forts, burial mounds, and linear earthworks - on Cranborne Chase. He excavated with meticulous care and, with Flinders Petrie, may be said to have invented the modern technique of British field archaeology. He stressed the importance of recording all finds, especially ordinary things. His accounts of his work and the models he made of his excavations have enabled modern archaeologists to follow his work from beginning to end and to reinterpret his finds in the light of modern knowledge. He insisted on rapid publication, and he had his five-volume Excavations in Cranborne Chase (1887-1898) privately printed and distributed free.

When the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act was made law in 1882, largely at the instigation of his friend Sir John Lubbock (Lord Avebury), he became the first inspector of ancient monuments in Britain; but he soon gave up this appointment, finding the authorities in Whitehall insufficiently cooperative.

Pitt-Rivers had very clear ideas about the cultural process in prehistory and once declared, “History is evolution.” His detailed study of British firearms, combined with his belief in the Darwinian concept of evolution, made him formulate the idea that all material objects developed in an evolutionary way and could be arranged in typological sequences.

Pitt-Rivers began what may justly be called a sociological approach to artifacts, whether contemporary or prehistoric. He insisted that his collections were “not for the purpose of surprising anyone, either by the beauty or value of the objects exhibited, but solely with a view to instruction. For this purpose, ordinary and typical specimens rather than rare objects have been selected and arranged in sequence.” With Flinders Petrie, he was a leader not only of new techniques in archaeological excavation but also of the revolution that led archaeology away from the contemplation of objects of art to the contemplation of all objects.

Achievements

• Augustus Pitt Rivers' major achievement was in becoming one of the most prominent archaeologists of his time, who was called the “father of British archaeology.” Pitt-Rivers developed and adopted a sociological approach to the study of excavated objects and emphasized the instructional value of common artifacts. His large-scale excavations, models of organization and painstaking care, unearthed villages, camps, cemeteries, and barrows (burial mounds) at sites such as Woodcutts, Rotherley, South Lodge, Bokerly Dyke, and Wansdyke.
  
  His efforts resulted in one of the classics of archaeology, the richly illustrated Excavations in Cranborne Chase, 5 vol. (1887–1903), which Pitt-Rivers printed privately. He also observed a similarity between the stone implements used in Europe when certain rhinoceroses and mammoths roamed there and the implements characteristic of the dawning stages of Egyptian culture.
  
  Also, his talent for experimental research was utilized in the investigation into improvements of the army rifle, and he was largely responsible for starting the Hythe School of Musketry. His collection of weapons and instruments in the history of man became famous, and, after being exhibited in 1874–1875 at the Bethnal Green Museum, was presented in 1885 to the University of Oxford.
  
  His excavations around Rushmore resulted in valuable “finds”; he founded a local museum and published several illustrated volumes. His international collection of about 22, 000 objects was the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, while his collection of English archaeology from the area around Stonehenge forms the basis of the collection at The Salisbury Museum in Wiltshire.
  
  In 1876 Pitt-Rivers became a fellow of the Royal Society and in 1886 an Honorary Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Excavations In Cranborne Chase, Near Rushmore, On The Borders Of Dorset And Wilts

    (Volume 1)

    1887
  • Excavations In Cranborne Chase, Near Rushmore, On The Borders Of Dorset And Wilts

    (Volume 4)

    1887
  • On the Development and Distribution of Primitive Locks and Keys 1883
  • Primitive Warfare: Illustrated by Specimens from the Museum of the Institution 1867
  • King John's House, Tollard Royal, Wilts 1890
  • The Evolution of Culture, and Other Essays 1900
  • Antique Works of Art from Benin, West Africa 1900
  • On Some Flint Implements Found Associated with Roman Remains in Oxfordshire and the Isle of Thanet 1869
  • Address to the Anthropological Section of the British Association 1872
  • Roovesmore Fort, and Stones Inscribed with Oghams, in the Parish of Aglish, County Cork 1868
  • Report On Excavations in the Pen Pits, Near Penselwood, Somerset 1884
  • Antique works of art from Benin: collected by Lieutenant-General Pitt Rivers 1900
  • On the Discovery of Chert Implements in Stratified Gravel in the Nile Valley Near Thebes 1882
  • On the Discovery of Palaeolithic Implements in Association With Elephas Primigenius in the Gravels of the Thames Valley at Acton 1872

Views

Pitt Rivers was an ardent subscriber to the new anthropological theory of evolution and believed that the same progression that had brought the rifle from the spear also could be applied to show that evolution was the method of human progression.

He was deeply influenced by the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer and went on to develop the idea of typology, i.e. the classification of artifacts in a chronological sequence. Rivers' method of classification of types he coined 'typology'. It placed artifacts in a chronological sequence based on development technology. Pitt Rivers firmly believed that his theory of typology suggested that cultural change occurred from generation to generation through material development. His purpose in collecting so great a number of worldwide artifacts was not only for public display but to prove his theory of the chronology of human history.

Pitt Rivers promoted a number of radical principals that, although were innate to his own methodical character, were far-reaching in the evolution of archaeology. No excavation should ever be permitted unless directly supervised by a trustworthy and responsible person. Slow and meticulous precision in the field should not be regarded as a fault. Dating is best determined by the study of the low-value rubbish remains from a site. His professional colleagues in the field commonly scoffed at these ideas. It would be thirty years after his death before his principals were fully adopted by archaeologists. Even more radical, however, was his insight into the scientific approach to research and investigation. In this, Pitt Rivers stands apart from all other contemporaries.

Also, Pitt Rivers was an advocate for cremation. Even though many people believed that it was immoral to destroy a corpse, the cremation movement favored a practical way to dispose of bodies.

Quotations: "The objects are arranged in sequence with a view to show ... the successive ideas by which the minds of men in a primitive condition of culture have progressed in the development of their arts from the simple to the complex, and from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. ... Human ideas as represented by the various products of human industry are capable of classification into genera, species, and varieties in the same manner as the products of the vegetable animal kingdoms ... If therefore we can obtain a sufficient number of objects to represent the succession of ideas, it will be found that they are capable of being arranged in museums upon a similar plan."

Membership

In 1876 Pitt-Rivers became a fellow of the Royal Society.

• 

  Royal Society , United Kingdom

  1876 - 1900

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Henry Balfour, first keeper of the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford said, and it was from firearms that “he was led to believe that the same principles must probably govern the development of the other arts, appliances, and ideas of mankind.”

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer

Connections

In February 1853, Pitt Rivers married Alice Stanley, a daughter of the politician Edward Stanley, and women's education campaigner Henrietta Stanley. Alice’s parents were initially opposed to the match though they eventually relented. The couple had nine children who survived to adulthood and they remained married for 47 years until Pitt Rivers died in 1900.

Father:

William Lane-Fox

1796-1832

Mother:

Lady Caroline Douglas

1797-1873

Wife:

Alice Margaret Stanley

collaborator:

Flinders Petrie

Together with Pitt Rivers, he has invented the modern technique of British field archaeology. He stressed the importance of recording all finds, especially ordinary things.

Uncle:

George Douglas

23 December 1789 – 31 March 1858, known as George Douglas until 1827, was a Scottish Tory politician.

Brother:

William Edward Lane-Fox

born 1818

colleague:

John Lubbock

John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, 4th Baronet, (30 April 1834 – 28 May 1913), known as Sir John Lubbock, 4th Baronet from 1865 until 1900, was an English banker, Liberal politician, philanthropist, scientist, and polymath. Lubbock worked in his family company as a banker but made significant contributions in archaeology, ethnography, and several branches of biology. He coined the terms "Paleolithic" and "Neolithic" to denote the Old and New Stone Ages, respectively.

colleague:

Edward Tylor

Edward Tylor was another colleague of Pitt-Rivers and closely associated with the founding collection in its early years at Oxford, described it as "one of the best contributions made by Englishmen to the study of culture".

References

• Pitt Rivers: The Life and Archaeological Work of Lieutenant-General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers
  1991
• General Pitt-Rivers: The Father of Scientific Archaeology
  1984
• The Classification of Artefacts in the Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford
  1970
• Index To "excavations In Cranborne Chase" And "king John's House, Tollard Royal.": Also A Memoir Of General Pitt. Rivers
  2018
• General Pitt-Rivers: Evolution and archaeology in the nineteenth century
  1977
• The Pitt-Rivers Museum
  1929