Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford (28 October 1886 – 28 November 1957) was a British archaeologist who specialised in the archaeology of prehistoric Britain and Sudan. A keen proponent of aerial archaeology, he spent most of his career as the archaeological officer of the Ordnance Survey (OS) and also wrote a range of books on archaeological subjects. Born in Bombay, British India, to a wealthy middle-class Scottish family, Crawford moved to England as an infant and was raised by his aunts in London and Hampshire. He read geography at Keble College, Oxford, and worked briefly in that field before devoting himself professionally to archaeology. Employed by the philanthropist Henry Wellcome, Crawford oversaw the excavation of Abu Geili in Sudan before returning to England shortly before the First World War. During the conflict he served in both the London Scottish Regiment and the Royal Flying Corps, where he was involved in ground and aerial reconnaissance along the Western Front. After an injury forced a period of convalescence in England, he returned to the Western Front, where he was captured by the German Army in 1918 and held as a prisoner of war until the end of the conflict. In 1920, Crawford was employed by the Ordnance Survey, touring Britain to plot the location of archaeological sites, and in the process identified several that were previously unknown. Increasingly interested in aerial archaeology, he used Royal Air Force photographs to identify the extent of the Stonehenge Avenue, excavating it in 1923. With the archaeologist Alexander Keiller, he conducted an aerial survey of many counties in southern England and raised the finances to secure the land around Stonehenge for The National Trust. In 1927, he established the scholarly journal Antiquity, which contained contributions from many of Britain's most prominent archaeologists, and in 1939 he served as president of The Prehistoric Society. An internationalist and socialist, he came under the influence of Marxism and for a time became a Soviet sympathiser. During the Second World War he worked with the National Buildings Record, photographically documenting Southampton. After retiring in 1946, he refocused his attention on Sudanese archaeology and wrote several further books prior to his death. Friends and colleagues remembered Crawford as a cantankerous and irritable individual. His contributions to British archaeology, including in Antiquity and aerial archaeology, have been widely acclaimed; some have referred to him as one of the great pioneering figures in the field. His photographic archive remained of use to archaeologists into the 21st century. A biography of Crawford by Kitty Hauser was published in 2008.
Early life
Childhood: 1886–1904 O. G. S. Crawford was born on 28 October 1886 at Breach Candy, a suburb of Bombay in British India. His father, Charles Edward Gordon Crawford, was a civil servant who had been educated at Marlborough College and Wadham College, Oxford before moving to India, where he became a High Court judge at Thane. The Crawford family came from Ayrshire in Scotland, and the child's great-uncle was the politician Robert Wigram Crawford. Crawford's mother, Alice Luscombe Mackenzie, was the daughter of a Scottish army doctor and his Devonshire wife. Alice died a few days after her son's birth, and so when he was three months old, Crawford was sent to England aboard the P&O liner Bokhara. During the journey he was entrusted to the care of his paternal aunt Eleanor, an Anglican nun who was the head of the Poona Convent of the Community of St Mary the Virgin.
In Britain, he spent the next seven years with two paternal aunts who lived together near to Portland Place in the Marylebone district of central London. Like his father, they were devout Christians, having been the children of a Scottish clergyman. Under their guardianship Crawford had little contact with other children or with men. Crawford saw his father on the few occasions that the latter visited England, prior to his death in India in 1894. In 1895, Crawford and his two aunts moved to a rural house in East Woodhay, Hampshire. Initially educated at Park House School, which he enjoyed, he was then moved to Marlborough College, his father's alma mater. He was unhappy there, complaining about bullying and enforced sporting activities, and characterising it as a "detestable house of torture". At the school, Crawford was influenced by his housemaster, F. B. Malim, who presided over the archaeological section of the college's Natural History Society and encouraged the boy's interest in the subject. It is possible that Malim provided something of a father figure for the young Crawford. With the society, Crawford visited such archaeological sites as Stonehenge, West Kennet Long Barrow, Avebury, and Martinsell. It was also through the society that he obtained Ordnance Survey maps of the landscape, allowing him to explore the downs near to his aunts' home. He began excavation of a barrow near to Bull's Copse, thus attracting the attention of the antiquarian Harold Peake, who was then involved in compiling the Victoria County History of Berkshire. Peake and his wife lived a Bohemian lifestyle, being vegetarians and social reformers, and their ideas had a strong impact on Crawford. Under the Peakes' influence, Crawford rejected his religious upbringing in favour of a rationalist world-view based in science. Crawford gained an appreciation from Peake for the understanding of past societies through an examination of the geographical landscape rather than simply through texts or artefacts.
University and early career: 1905–1914
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
