Leonard Woolley
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 143rd anniversary of the birth of Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, better known to posterity as C. Leonard Woolley (17 April 1880–20 February 1960), who was born on the outskirts of London on this day in 1880.
Almost everyone has heard of Howard Carter and the opening of the tomb of Tutanhkamen, but Leonard Woolley does not have the same name recognition, nor are we as familiar with his excavation of the Royal Tombs of Ur, though we should be. The artifacts themselves are almost equally as familiar. We know that Carter opened Tutakhnamen’s tomb on 02 November 1922, and many stories of breaking the seal on the tomb have been recorded, but we don’t have the same knowledge of Woolley’s discoveries at Ur, also in 1922. In A Social History of Archaeology: The British Experience, Kenneth Hudson described Woolley like this:
“Woolley had no fortune and no burning sense of mission. He was short of money all his life and he blundered into archaeology because he needed to find some way of making a living.”
Hudson quotes Woolley as follows:
“I have seldom been more surprised that I was when- it is nearly fifty years ago — the Warden of New College told me that he had decided that I should be an archaeologist. It is true that I had taken a course in Greek sculpture for my degree, but so had lots of undergraduates. Because of the bearing on Homer, I had read Schliemann’s romantic account of his discoveries, the Treasure of Priam at Troy and the Tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae, and like everyone else I was vaguely aware that Flinders Petrie was, year after year, making history in Egypt and that Arthur Evans was unearthing the Palace of Minos in Crete, but all this was at best only background knowledge and the idea of making a life study of it had never occurred to me.”
While Woolley may have stumbled into the profession of archaeology, his discoveries were of the first rank (perhaps he was the right man in the right place at the right time), and he came to be known as an effective popularize of archaeology. But archaeology was still a discipline in its infancy, into which someone at that time might stumble and yet make major contributions.
In Creating Prehistory: Druids, Ley Hunters and Archaeologists in Pre-War Britain, Adam Stout recounts a number of stories about the major founding figures in British archaeology and their efforts toward what we would today call “field building”:
“In a ‘Memorandum’ to a funding application made 10 years earlier, Wheeler had claimed that British archaeology urgently needed a ‘central focus, to which effort and material may be directed . . .’ Sir George Hill, Director of the British Museum, writing in support of the same bid, suggested that the Institute might serve as a ‘sister institution’ to his own, charged with carrying out similar work ‘on modern lines’. These comments suggest that the remit of Wheeler’s dream Institute would not be confined to education alone. This hunch seems to be confirmed by the unguarded letter which Sir Leonard Woolley, one of Wheeler’s first lecturers, sent to the Sunday Times in August 1937, in which he described the newly opened Institute as a potential ‘competent central authority’ for administering excavation funding. The ideal Institute would make archaeology as well as archaeologists.”
In Timothy Darvill’s review of Creating Prehistory, Darvill notes Collingwood’s (often indirect) influence upon his colleagues:
“Careful consideration is given to the efforts of scholars at Oxford, Cambridge, Liverpool, and University College London in forging new visions of prehistory, and there is a nod towards the work of Collingwood and his attempts to develop a coherent philosophy of history. But there is not nearly enough on the anthropology of the time, and almost nothing on the role of geography, though this was following a parallel track to archaeology at the time and had a great influence on Crawford and others.”
Of Collingwood’s role in archaeological field building Stout writes:
“…awareness of the questioner’s ‘positionality’ put Collingwood decades ahead of his contemporaries, and freed him up to ask some uncomfortable questions about the nature of the past itself. The ‘first principle’ of the philosophy of history was the idea that ‘the past which an historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present’. It is called into being by ‘disentangling it out of the present in which it actually exists’; and elsewhere, ‘the past simply as past is wholly unknowable . . . it is the past as residually preserved in the present that is alone knowable’.” (p. 237)
Collingwood himself was an archaeologist, a “Romanist” as Stout puts it, while Woolley was unearthing a much deeper past, which,arguably, could also be said to lead to uncomfortable questions about the relationship of the present to the past. But, most of all, what the archaeology of Woolley and others of his time who created the discipline meant coming to terms which much more of the past than we had known through written records. In Digging Up the Past Woolley bluntly makes the case of archaeology’s contribution to history:
“Thanks to excavation, thousands of years of human history are now familiar which a hundred years ago were a total blank, but this is not all, perhaps not even the most important part. The old histories, resting principally on written documents, were largely confined to those events which at every age writers thought most fit to record — wars, political happenings, the chronicles of kings — with such side-lights as could be gleaned from the literature of the time. The digger may produce more written records, but he also brings to light a mass of objects illustrating the arts and handicrafts of the past, the temples in which men worshipped, the houses in which they lived, the setting in which their lives were spent; he supplies the material for a social history of a sort that could never have been undertaken before. Until Schliemann dug at Mycene, and Sir Arthur Evans in Crete, no one guessed that there had been a Minoan civilization. Not a single written word has been found to tell of it, yet we can trace the rise and fall of the ancient Minoan power, can see again the splendours of the Palace of Minos, and imagine how life was lived alike there and in the crowded houses of the humbler folk. The whole history of Egypt has been recovered by archeological work, and that in astonishing detail; I suppose we know more about ordinary life in Egypt in the fourteenth century before Christ than we do about that of England in the fourteenth century A.D. To the spade we owe our knowledge of the Sumerians and the Hittites, great empires whose very existence had been forgotten, and in the case of other ancient peoples, the Babylonians and the Assyrians, the dry bones of previously known fact have had life breathed into them by the excavation of buried sites.”
The deeper past opened up by archaeology also opened up a general field of knowledge about human development:
“Our theme is not the history of this or that people or nation, and, although the regional treatment was often dictated by circumstances, stress has been laid throughout upon the degree of common effort that has gone to the making of the world. No people has lived for itself alone. Sometimes we can see how, by the catalysis of war or of trade or of migration, disparate elements of different cultures were, even in those early days, amalgamated into something new and of value; sometimes the combination was to occur only after the date at which our volume ends, but even then our knowledge of what was to be makes worth while an understanding of the elements so to be resolved.”
In the next paragraph Woolley notes that, “The Bronze Age was indeed the formative period in man’s cultural advance, and in the course of it the greater part of what constitutes modern civilization visibly begins to take shape.” Archaeology, then, not only gives us history, but the originso f civilization, which written records do not capture.
Further Resources
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Mallowan, .M.E.L. “Sir Leonard Woolley” Expedition Magazine 3.1 (1960): n. pag. Expedition Magazine. Penn Museum, 1960 Web. 17 Apr 2023 <http://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/?p=571>
https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/sir-leonard-woolley/
Darvill, T. (2011). Creating Prehistory: Druids, Ley Hunters and Archaeologists in Post-War Britain. Time and Mind, 4(2), 241–243. doi:10.2752/175169711x12961583765577
10.2752/175169711X12961583765577
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2752/175169711X12961583765577
