Wilts Obituary. 



79 



in 1880 he succeeded to the Eivers estates under the will of his great 

 uncle, the last Lord Eivers, and assumed the name of Pitt-Eivers — his 

 sons, however, being known as Fox-Pitt. 



The Athenceum, 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 Eichard Colt Hoare 

 as a great antiquary — and rightly so — but Gen. Pitt-Eivers stands a head 

 and shoulders above him. The reputation of both rests ultimately upon 

 their diggings— the difference between them was this : Sir Eichard 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 Eichard 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 archaeology 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-Eoman origin of the dyke, for 

 they were both of Eoman origin, and they lay on what had been the 

 original surface of the turf before the mound ivas heaped up over it. It 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 Eushmore 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 



