-" 
z Che 
"ery eae eee 
Wilts Obituary. 79 
in 1880 he succeeded to the Rivers estates under the will of his great 
uncle, the last Lord Rivers, and assumed the name of Pitt-Rivers—his 
sons, however, being known as Fox-Pitt. 
The Athenewm, which amongst the many obituary notices of the 
General, gives perhaps the best, says of him that he ‘‘ was without any 
exaggeration one of the first men of the century as an anthropologist and 
exact antiquary.” This may seem a good deal to say, but to those who 
know what the work that he accomplished was, it is no whit beyond the 
truth. We in Wiltshire are accustomed to rank Sir Richard Colt Hoare 
as a great antiquary—and rightly so—but Gen. Pitt-Rivers stands a head 
and shoulders above him. The reputation of both rests ultimately upon 
their diggings—the difference between them was this: Sir Richard dug 
to find objects of antiquity; the General dug to gain evidence as to the 
history of the earthworks he excavated, and as to the lives lived by the 
people by: whom those earthworks were erected. ‘To Sir Richard the time 
spent in sinking a shaft into the centre of a barrow in which no unbroken 
urn, or dagger, or incense cup could be found was scarcely more than so 
much time and trouble wasted, and the whole excavation could be 
dismissed in a couple of lines. With the General, on the other hand, a 
month’s careful and laborious work, resulting only, perhaps, in a handful 
of broken bits of pottery, was made to yield results having a more 
important bearing on the early history of Britain than whole tomes of 
speculation by the learned antiquaries of earlier days. It is true the 
later excavator had all the advantage over the earlier of the great advance 
made by archeology and anthropology since the beginning of the 19th 
century—but, on the other hand, it must not be forgotten that in bringing 
about that advance the General himself took no small share. The cutting 
of the sections through the Wansdyke some years ago was a crucial 
instance of the difference between the old methods of investigation and 
the new. A fortnight’s labour by a considerable staff of labourers, 
overlooked by the General and his assistants, produced as nearly as 
possible nothing—a bit of rusty iron, and a fragment of earthenware, 
neither bigger than your thumb-nail—and yet they were sufficient to 
upset volumes of theories as to the pre-Roman origin of the dyke, for 
they were both of Roman origin, and they lay on what had been the 
original surface of the turf before the mound was heaped up over it. Tt is 
obvious that results such as this can only be reached by the exercise of 
the utmost care and exactitude, and the first rule of the grammar of 
excavation set forth by the General in those four noble volumes in which 
he records the results of his twenty years’ work on Cranborne Chase is 
that the exact position and depth at which every single object occurs— 
even if it is only a broken potsherd, and there are thousands of them— 
must be accurately noted if you are to hope to gain any certain information 
from your work. It was by this accurate noting of the position of 
literally thousands of separate fragments of pottery in the ditches and 
banks of the dykes and camps excavated round Rushmore that those 
‘average sections’’ were produced in which even the man in the street 
may read the history of the earthwork as clearly and as certainly as the 
