Sir Alexander Cunningham

Sir Alexander Cunningham, (born Jan. 23, 1814, London, Eng.—died Nov. 28, 1893, London), British army officer and archaeologist who excavated many sites in India, including Sārnāth and Sānchi, and served as the first director of the Indian Archaeological Survey.

At age 19 he joined the Bengal Engineers and spent 28 years in the British service in India, retiring as major general in 1861. Early in his career he met James Prinsep, a British numismatist and Indian scholar, who ignited his interest in Indian history and coins. In 1837 Cunningham excavated at Sārnāth, outside Vārānasi (Benares), one of the most sacred Buddhist shrines, and carefully prepared drawings of the sculptures. In 1850 he excavated Sānchi, site of some of the oldest surviving buildings in India. In addition to a study of the temple architecture of Kāshmir (1848) and a work on Ladākh (1854), he published The Bhilsa Topes (1854), the first serious attempt to trace Buddhist history through its architectural remains.

In 1861 he agreed to become director of the Indian Archaeological Survey and remained with it until it was dissolved (1865). He resumed his post when the survey was restored (1870) and during the next 15 years carried out many archaeological explorations among the ruins of northern India. He published The Ancient Geography of India (1871), the first collection of the edicts of the 3rd-century-BC Indian emperor Aśoka, and The Stûpa of Bharhut (1879). Over the years he gathered a large collection of Indian coins, the choicest of which were purchased by the British Museum. After his retirement from the survey (1885), he devoted himself to Indian numismatics and wrote two books on the subject. He was knighted in 1887.

Excavation archaeology

Excavation, in archaeology, the exposure, recording, and recovery of buried material remains.

In a sense, excavation is the surgical aspect of archaeology: it is surgery of the buried landscape and is carried out with all the skilled craftsmanship that has been built up in the era since archaeological pioneers Heinrich Schliemann, often considered to be the modern discoverer of prehistoric Greece, and Flinders Petrie, who invented a sequence dating method that made possible the reconstruction of history from the remains of ancient cultures. Excavations can be classified, from the point of view of their purpose, as planned, rescue, or accidental. Most important excavations are the result of a prepared plan—that is to say, their purpose is to locate buried evidence about an archaeological site. Many are project oriented, as, for example, when a scholar studying the life of the pre-Roman, Celtic-speaking Gauls of France may deliberately select a group of hill forts and excavate them, as Sir Mortimer Wheeler did in northwestern France in the years before the outbreak of World War II. But many excavations, particularly in the heavily populated areas of central and northern Europe, are done not from choice but from necessity. Gravel digging, clearing the ground for airports, quarrying, road widening and building, the construction of houses, factories, and public buildings frequently threaten the destruction of sites known to contain archaeological remains. Emergency excavations then have to be mounted to rescue whatever knowledge of the past can be obtained before these remains are obliterated forever. Partial destruction of cities in western Europe by bombing during World War II allowed rescue excavations to take place before rebuilding. A temple of Mithras in the City of London, Viking settlements in Dublin and at Århus, Denmark, and the original 6th-century-BCE Greek settlement of Massalia (Marseille) were discovered in this way. An extension of the runways at London Airport led to the discovery of a pre-Roman Celtic temple there.

The role of chance in the discovery of archaeological sites and portable finds is considerable. Farmers have often unearthed archaeological finds while plowing their fields, and accidental discovery by construction crews is common. The famous painted and engraved Upper Paleolithic cave of Lascaux in southern France was discovered by chance in 1940 when four French schoolboys decided to investigate a hole left by an uprooted tree. They widened a smaller shaft at the base of the hole and jumped through to find themselves in the middle of this remarkable pagan sanctuary. Similarly, the first cache of the Dead Sea Scrolls was discovered in 1947 by a Bedouin looking for a stray animal. These accidental finds often lead to important excavations. At Barnénès, in north Brittany, a contractor building a road got his stone from a neighbouring prehistoric cairn (burial mound) and, in so doing, discovered and partially destroyed a number of prehistoric burial chambers. The French archaeologist P.-R. Giot was able to halt these depredations and carry out scientific excavations that revealed Barnénès to be one of the most remarkable and interesting prehistoric burial mounds in western Europe.